For
their long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s pre-eminent crowdpleaser Little Miss Sunshine, the
husband-and-wife directorial team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have
taken on a decidedly high-concept literary item along the lines of Adaptation. or The Purple Rose of Cairo. As penned by its young leading lady Zoe
Kazan – granddaughter of movie legend Elia – Ruby Sparks could also be read as a critique of a strain of
Hollywood thinking, particularly with regard to the female of the species. This
particular high-concept has teeth and claws.
Paul
Dano plays Calvin Weir-Fields, a writer with a massive albatross around his
neck: the acclaimed novel he wrote as a prodigy ten years ago, and has since
found impossible to follow up. With his youthful confidence disappearing with
each day of staring at blank foolscap, Calvin creates a consoling fantasy for
himself. With her wide eyes, boho style and quasi-adorable quirks, the
eponymous Ruby is the model of the manic pixie dreamgirl archetype defined by
the critic Nathan Rabin. Trouble starts when isolated items of female clothing
show up in Calvin’s apartment, and then – after an especially frenzied session
at the typewriter – Ruby herself, as embodied by Kazan: an imaginary girlfriend
everybody else just so happens to be able to see.
Calvin
realises he can make this fantasy figure happy by bashing out another line of
prose, and so the pair’s early time together is described in a deliberately
cutesy, too-good-to-be-true manner: look, there’s Ruby in her twirly dress,
leaping fully-clothed into a swimming pool! Gradually, however, we see just
what a nightmare this dreamgirl would be to live with for any stretch of time.
(Dayton and Faris make a pointed fetish item out of the writer’s split-level
home, in which Ruby and Calvin rarely enjoy equal footing.) Eventually, for
better and worse, Ruby will take on a life of her own, and it’s up to Calvin to
adapt to that: does he write the words women say, or those words he himself
wants to hear?
Reduced
to these bare conceptual bones, Ruby
Sparks might sound like so much finger-wagging Hollywood corrective, but as
a film, it has the advantage of jokes, real charm, and two cherishable
performers creating a relationship you really do believe in. Kazan pushes a
kooky archetype about as far as it will go – to the point of crazy-eyed
insanity, at points – while giving Ruby moods, modulation, internal life: she
fights for the reality of the character, in the hope other writers will take
note of what she’s attempting to communicate through her. Dano, too, has to
operate on two levels: to show the uptight self-protection of a boy who’s been
alone for too long, but also reveal the gentle heart beating beneath the
surface, the creative sensibility still to be fully formed.
Though
the film is largely forgiving of its muddle-headed protagonist, one party
scene, where Calvin’s myriad personality flaws are painfully laid out by his ex
(True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll),
suggests it may just be too honest to match its predecessor’s feelgood success:
the ambiguously sunny ending leaves it for us to decide whether Calvin has
turned over a new leaf, or is merely embarking on another chapter in the same
old story. Nevertheless, this is the most fully-dimensional rendering of those
what-if? stories Woody Allen has been labouring over for the past decade. As a
drop-in at Calvin’s folks – Annette Bening in tie-dye, and Antonio Banderas as
a wood sculptor responsible for a preposterously tall treehouse – makes
resoundingly clear, this buoyant fantasy recognises life can be stranger and
richer than fiction.
Ruby Sparks opens in selected cinemas from today.
No comments:
Post a Comment