Movie Review: Ruby Sparks

Movie Review: Ruby Sparks

Directed by Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Starring Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas

Rating: A

            This is a charming movie with a great and original concept. I have never before read, seen, or heard a story along the lines of this fictional great. The antisocial writer creates his perfect woman in writing and she comes to life. It is interesting how the idea of Ruby escalates from what seems to be a figment of Calvin’s imagination to someone everyone can see and interact with; she becomes his girlfriend. He eventually takes a break from writing in an attempt to stop manipulating his relationship. However, when he created her she was his ideal woman and she grows unhappy in a relationship in which he won’t let her do anything but be with him. So, he starts writing again to make her happy, and then in an attempt to make him happy. He wanted the storybook romance of his creation and when he’s not writing what she is doing and feeling she is able to act on her own free will and her actions are not what he desires. She says Calvin has rules and won’t tell her what they are until she breaks them and didn’t live up to the image of who he wanted her to be.

It is odd that while she is a real person with a real past she was bound by what Calvin would write. She had a past and real; she just happened to end up in his life exactly when he wrote about it. In the end when he is proving a point to her by making her act exactly what he wrote he is going through mental tumult as he is letting her go. He is coming to the realization that the story needs to end. She was physically real, but still a figment of his imagination. His problem in the beginning is that he cannot write, he cannot come up with a new story, but in the end he has the greatest story of his lifetime.

            I greatly enjoyed this story. I had no clue where the twists and turns would take me. The acting was convincing and I lost myself in the movie. A great amount of my appreciation for the film comes from the fact that I have never witnessed anything of the like. It was refreshing.