Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly movie column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2022. I’m so happy you’re here.
Ruby Sparks, written by and starring Zoe Kazan (with input from her boyfriend and co-star Paul Dano), was at one point my favorite movie. I bought it on DVD. I bought the soundtrack on iTunes. I tweeted at Zoe asking her to put the screenplay online (she responded telling me it was available at the WGAW library). I watched it a lot. And then I forgot about it for, like, eight years.
And that’s OK! Sometimes a romantic comedy is an in-the-moment pleasure, sweet and bright and uncomplicated like ice cream. You don’t savor it; it would melt. You don’t unpack it. It’s ice cream, of course it’s good! But that’s my job here, so I re-watched the movie today and found it as elegantly plotted as I vaguely remembered, but much darker now that I’m older.
With a tidy little cast and unfussy direction from Little Miss Sunshine’s Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, Ruby Sparks is in many ways a tale as old as Pygmalion: Artist projects favorite qualities onto art; it comes alive and they fall in love. In this case the artist is Calvin (Dano), wunderkind writer who churned out a bestseller at 19 and seems to have been mentally stuck at that age ever since. Or maybe he stopped developing when his father died some years ago; the timeline isn’t important. What we know about Calvin is that he’s terribly insecure, shy, unable to write, and profoundly lonely. He hugs a teddy bear during his therapy sessions. His only friend is his brother Harry (Chris Messina), who is married with a baby.
Calvin’s life is quirky enough. He oversleeps, writes on a typewriter, is hounded by a barely legal, horny groupie named Mabel (Mabel!) (Alia Shawkat), and his dog is a boy but pees like a girl. But you have to remember that this was 2012, the absolute apotheosis of hipster-Tumblr-cutesy-ironic-mustache-bacon culture. So when Calvin starts having romantic dreams, they are, of course, about a girl so flirty, so scattered, so downright adorable that she literally puts the dream in “manic pixie dream girl.” He develops a crush on this fictional creature and then, in an act of divinity or manifestation, she appears, in the flesh: Ruby Sparks (Kazan), 26, bad with money, a painter, always in a vintage dress and purple tights. Not even Red-era Taylor Swift would have been so bold! But Ruby is.
This was 2012, the absolute apotheosis of hipster-Tumblr-cutesy-ironic-mustache-bacon culture. So when Calvin starts having romantic dreams, they are, of course, about a girl so flirty, so scattered, so downright adorable that she literally puts the dream in “manic pixie dream girl.”
For a time, they are blissfully happy together. It’s an absolute delight watching Calvin and Harry work out whether she’s a miracle or an impostor, and every time Dano reacts to something otherworldly, I want to freeze the frame on his face. The man can emote! Kazan, on the other hand, plays Ruby with a kind of wide-eyed vacancy that she also deployed as Harper onstage in Angels In America. A valid choice in both cases, but Dano is by far the more fun performer to watch.
Unfortunately, Calvin is perhaps too adept of a writer for his own good. Though Harry tells him that his manuscript is lacking because the woman he’s written isn’t three-dimensional (“Quirky, messy women whose problems only make them endearing are not real”), Ruby, once she arrives, turns out to be as flawed as any other human, and not in an adorable way. She’s sometimes inattentive and less than reassuring, so when she asks for space in the relationship, Calvin does the thing he swore he’d never do: he returns to the typewriter, untouched since Ruby’s arrival, to alter her personality.
Here we get the classic “careful what you wish for” developments. Calvin makes Ruby more dependent; she becomes clingy. He makes her happy; her mind is like that of a child. Eventually, he realizes he needs to let her be her own person, but that person flirts with his friend, prompting a fight that descends into a scene straight out of a psychological horror movie: Calvin reveals to Ruby that he is, basically, her creator and puppet-master by putting her through a series of humiliating exercises that culminate in her jumping up and down calling him a genius. (This is why celebrities sleep with fans, after all, isn’t it?)
Don’t worry, he’s no monster. He lets her go, writes a book, moves on. The lesson is fairly obvious: don’t fall in love with a figment of your imagination. Don’t expect someone to live up to the role you’ve created for them. Calvin even says, before Ruby arrives, that the girls he meets who know him from his book aren’t “interested in me, they’re interested in some idea of me.” Hardly a new phenomenon. As Rita Hayworth once remarked, “Men go to bed with Gilda, but awaken with me.”
Now, falling for a fictional character is not unique to men. Pop onto the Mr. Darcy Thirst side of TikTok and you’ll find scads of women madly in love with guys who do not exist. Fan fiction was created just to satisfy this thirst. But while the fantasy goes both ways, there’s an undercurrent in Ruby Sparks that explores misogyny in a way I didn’t catch the first three or 12 times I watched the movie.
Harry, apparently a devoted husband who respects his wife and women in general (I’m not even going to get into his and Calvin’s mommy issues), tells his brother that Ruby, on the page, isn’t deep or true. He’s perceptive enough to get that. But once Ruby arrives and they discover the abilities of the typewriter, he immediately suggests that Calvin make her a big-titted, long-legged bimbo who loves giving blowjobs. Harry says he must do this on behalf of “all men.” Calvin brushes off these superficial concerns. Ruby is already perfect the way she is, which is to say, the way he made her! And conveniently, that includes a love of fellatio!
The lesson is fairly obvious: don’t fall in love with a figment of your imagination. Don’t expect someone to live up to the role you’ve created for them.
As if that’s not Stepford Wife-y enough, by the end, Calvin is totally controlling, and I’m reminded that you don’t actually need a magic typewriter to force a woman to act the way you want. If you have more status, more money, and more power, you can break a woman down and build her back up exactly how you want, punishing her when she disobeys and rewarding her when she complies. Abusers do it every day.
The suggestion here isn’t that “all men” would, given a magic typewriter, behave this way…it’s that any man could. The power corrupts. Calvin’s intentions were pure when Ruby first arrived, but when she started to need distance, his ego couldn’t handle it, and he turned into the worst kind of boyfriend. Harry and Calvin’s mother (Annette Bening) took on their father’s personality when he was alive, and now mirrors her new husband. She seems happy, but it’s still unsettling, because this new husband doesn’t seem to be forcing her, just encouraging her…and she embraces his lifestyle fully.
And it doesn’t help that in a movie about underwritten characters, the only underwritten character is Mabel, who is just too cheap and horny to earn her screen time. Does this story actually grapple with freedom in relationships, or just pay lip service to it? At one point Harry tells Calvin, “I’m not saying you can’t write. I’m saying you don’t know jack shit about women.” Later, during a fight, Calvin upsets Ruby so much that she cries and screams on the sidewalk. A (male) good samaritan offers to call the police; she declines, then tries to leave, so Calvin picks her up and carries her away so they can talk.
The suggestion here isn’t that “all men” would, given a magic typewriter, behave this way…it’s that any man could. The power corrupts.
The moment is played for laughs and, hey, it’s a fantasy rom-com. I get that. But throughout, Calvin and Harry seem flabbergasted, mystified, by women in general, fictional and real, as if we are indescribably mysterious creatures and men are naturally dumb lunkheads who should be praised for doing the minimum. Ruby remarks to the brothers that their mom must be proud, because it’s hard to raise good boys. Isn’t that letting everyone off the hook a little too easy?
On the other hand…I’ve been there. I’ve been Ruby, desperate to please. I’ve been Calvin, aching to control. I’ve even been Harry, confused and making the best of it. Ruby Sparks might not be the most comprehensive or nuanced exploration of this particular wish-fulfillment scenario, but it taps into something that is, unlike Ruby, real and true. And maybe it’s not ambitious, but it’s also not pretentious. It doesn’t try to be too much or say everything. It’s a neat rom-com, a cute story, a pat lesson, and a pleasant watch. And it’s better to embrace something true and flawed than the my-favorite-little-indie ideal I might have had in my head, right? Isn’t that the point? FL
