Ruby Sparks is a film which flows through human emotion fluidly and displays both the beauty and the want of human nature. It manages to elate, surprise, sympathise and deride. Both the leads, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan gently haul us into their imaginative world and it is hard for us to let go. Floating and cheerful in the beginning, it quickly descends into darkness and chaos, and the vicissitudes are frankly jarring, but definitely not unbelievable. I truly enjoyed the fresh and crisp concept of this romantic fantasy.
Calvin is a talented but asocial writer suffering from the proverbial writer’s block. On his therapist’s advice, he writes about a girl who appears often in his dreams. Being completely enamoured by her, he writes pages and pages about her complete personality and history, until one day, she appears in his house, completely unaware of the fact that she is a product of Calvin’s imagination. Understandably chaos soon ensues until Calvin realises that Ruby could be or rather, is, his actual girlfriend who he was waiting for all his life. He promises not to make any tweaks to her character, being happy with her the way she is. Ruby, for her part, is a beautiful elvish sort of girl who has an adorable child-like curiosity and zest for life. She easily segues into her real-world existence as though she’d always been, well, alive.
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The pair have the grandest time together replete with a visit to Calvin’s mother’s house with her quirky, “New-Age” attire and surroundings. Soon, Ruby starts getting bored with her life and starts acting more and more like a real and actual person developing thoughts and traits of her own. She starts socialising more, and this is where things start taking a shadowy turn. Calvin clearly is unable to cope without her and cannot digest the fact that she’s an actual being with freedoms of her own and rewrites her character to suit his needs. Before we know it, he’s made several changes in quick succession and it becomes quite plain to him that whatever he writes will never be enough to give him the Ruby he wants. This leads to angst and ill-will, and at a party, where he meets his ex, we learn of his selfish and narcissistic nature and the fixed and myopic idea he has of his loved ones which, if they deviate from, would result in anger and frustration from him. When Ruby and he return home, he reveals his control over her entire being.
The scene that follows is of a slightly disturbing nature wherein he demonstrates how, by just typing a few words on his weapon of choice, the typewriter, he can mould her as he pleases. Ruby Sparks is shocked and appalled at this and when he finally lets her go, flees away. This scene portrays how power can corrupt even the mildest and most refined of people and turn them into tyrants. It is well acted out and is shocking in nature.
Calvin fortunately realizes his cruelty and frees Ruby, so to speak, from her bonds, weeping copiously at his brutishness.
A few days later, we see that his book on Ruby has been published, and by the hand of fate, meets her in a park. Her hairstyle has been changed, and she doesn’t recognise him, but is friendly towards him and the movie ends with Calvin sitting down and engaging her in conversation.
Boldly and freely exploring the topics of character/intellectual manipulation and the morality of doing so, loneliness and love, this movie which has been excellently written by the lead, Zoe Kazan, is a winner with its charm and candour.
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