(500) Days of Bummer: Ruby Sparks
Ruby
Sparks: (500) Days of Bummer
Ruby Sparks
Year: 2012
Director: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Actors: Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Annette Bening
Zoe Kazan ought to know her way around a movie script. Her
grandfather, the Broadway and Hollywood legend Elia Kazan, directed A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront; her parents are
screenwriters Robin Swicord (Little
Women, Memoirs of a
Geisha, The Curious Case
of Benjamin Button) and Nicholas Kazan (Frances, Patty Hearst, Reversal of Fortune, Matilda). So the 28-year-old
writer-actress has the lineage to know what stories have worked in films, and
the cleverness to write herself a leading role in her own screenplay.
A high-concept twist on a familiar fantastic premise, Ruby Sparks is
designed — in fact, a little too carefully calculated — to be this summer’s hot
indie comedy in the tradition of Little
Miss Sunshine, The Kids Are
Alright and (500) Days of
Summer. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the duo that directed Little Miss Sunshine, have processed Kazan’s
original screenplay until it is by turns clever and soft, in just the places
that audiences like. The central characters are two winsome souls — the young
novelist Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) and free-spirited Ruby (Kazan) — who
seem made for each other. Yes, but not quite. Calvin madeRuby, made her up, wrote her down. No
wonder she loves the guy. He created her, as Pygmalion did Galatea.
(READ: Corliss’s
Ah, the imaginary friend. Children dream up these soul mates to
offer companionship and validation, to express their brighter or darker sides;
they also provide a blank slate for the infant creative impulse to scrawl on.
Hollywood, a factory of make-believe that manufactures grownup imaginary
friends the world can love or hate, loves this plot. Over the decades, such
actors as Joseph Cotten, Russell Crowe, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, James
Stewart and Robert Walker have played men intoxicated by their significant
imaginary others. (I’m trying not to give too much information to readers who
haven’t seen all these films. If you want to know the titles, you can find them
at the end of this review.*)
Kazan has another idea: that when we become adults, the kid is
still inside us. We often impose imaginary traits on those we love, remaking
them in our image — in a way, fictionalizing them — and priming ourselves for
disappointment when they turn out to be their own, real-life creations.
Reaching maturity means accepting the raw truth that people are different, that
they began writing their stories long before we met them, and that we should
not expect them to adhere to our fairy-tale ideals any more than that we should
suit theirs. Kazan’s script is a metaphor both for the impossible dream of the
ideal Significant Other and for creative artists who lose control of their
creations.
(READ: Mary Pols’
Calvin’s job is inventing invisible friends. As a 19-year-old he
write a novel that readers rapturously compared to The Catcher in the Rye. He’s been trying to
duplicate that magic spell ever since, but in the intervening decade he has
retreated into a splendid hermitage. He lives alone, if living is the word; for
he has closed himself to the experiences that might inspire a second novel.
Enter Ruby: a dream, an angelic blur, silhouetted in the blinding
Los Angeles sunlight. She’s friendly and bubbly and — for Calvin the acid test
— she likes his quirky dog Scotty, who has gender issues (he pees like a girl).
Calvin literally has dreamed of Ruby; now, at the urging of his shrink (Elliott
Gould), he begins a short story about her. What he types, she becomes: a
dynamite sex partner, a perfect speaker of French. He can make her do or be
anything. And the best thing about this invisible friend: she’s visible to
Calvin’s nagging brother Henry (Chris Messina) and their loopy mom (Annette
Bening) and her boyfriend (Antonio Banderas). No question, Ruby is perfect. But
like any brooding writer, Calvin has to start wondering what’s wrong with
perfect.
(READ: Richard Zoglin’s
Woody Allen has been down this meta road (The Purple Rose of Cairo), and Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation), but the genre rarely was this cuddly. Kazan
gives her modern lovers retro tastes that senior moviegoers can appreciate.
Calvin, not yet 30, pounds away on an Olympia typewriter — no computer for this
creator — and speaks on a phone so venerable it has a cord. Staring at one of
Henry’s Internet-age gadgets, he asks, “What does this thing even do?”, as if
he’s a visitor from an earlier century. And he is: the early- to mid-20th. His
dog is named after F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ruby’s pop-culture patron saints (also,
presumably, Calvin’s) are Humphrey Bogart and John Lennon; the soundtrack is
buttressed with ’60s songs like Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders’ “Game of
Love” — though in the Sylvie Vartan cover version, perhaps to underline Ruby’s
Francophone facility.
Calvin is mild on the surface, confused inside. That makes him a
snug fit for Dano, who has built a film career by being scrupulously
unassertive; hiding on screen is how he gets noticed. His voice is a tremulous
whisper. His body’s natural posture is a question mark, and so is his persona:
pensive and baffled. Even standing still, he appears to be retreating, as if
facing the wrong way on an escalator going down. In movies he is often paired
with older actors — Daniel Day Lewis in There
Will Be Blood, Kevin Kline in The Extra Man, Robert
De Niro in Being Flynn — who
don’t steal the show so much as they are handed it, and where Dano’s function
is to be the farm animal to their tornadoes.
(READ: Mary Pols
His passivity is acceptable for Calvin; Kazan has more trouble
inhabiting the character she created. Far from a conventional movie siren, she
makes an enormous effort to beguile. But movie charisma is a mysterious
quality; some actors have it — maybe they are born with it — and some don’t.
Bening, in the small role of a New Age mom whose current job is
“re-alphabetizing,” gives a lesson in effortless screen behavior that the young
leads can’t, for all their efforts, duplicate.
Same with this film. Ruby
Sparks tries its damnedest to make a picture that seduces moviegoers into
accepting it as their best imaginary friend forever. But the sweat shows more
than the sparkle.
by: http://www.time.com/time/
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