Ruby Sparks is the indie romance of the summer that stars Paul Dano—–an actor you either don’t like or have never heard of—–as a writer and Zoe Kazan as the title-character, a woman he literally creates. The central plot involves Dano’s writer trying to cure his block with a writing exercise describing the girl he can’t stop dreaming about. In a twist of high-concept comedy, she winds up becoming a real person, one that Dano can control and adjust…until he can’t.
What Works: What starts out as just another high-concept indie gradually becomes a much richer experience. It turns out that this is less about broad comedy (Dano’s brother keeps saying he should give Ruby bigger breasts) than an allegory for the way love actually is. The more Dano falls for his creation, the more she may be falling out of love for him, and when she starts becoming her own person—–liking things he hasn’t told her to, revealing traits he hasn’t put there—–he can’t seem to handle it. What the movie is exploring is the way love isn’t about how much you have in common with someone, but whether or not you can accept how different they are from you, and the strain it can put on a relationship if you can’t. By the last third, the movie had won me over and delved into a lot of truths about relationships.
What Doesn’t Work: Steve Coogan’s sleazy older writer seems to exist more as a plot device than as a real person, and a detour into Dano’s relationship with his mother (a ditzy Annette Bening…seems like there’s no other kind these days) and her boyfriend (Antonio Banderas) is necessary to introduce the darker last third but still goes on too long.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Any problems the movie has are small ones, and there’s a lot more to recommend than ridicule.