Neurosis hasn't seemed this adorably sane since Woody Allen. Clever, funny, expertly walking the line between arty and mainstream, Ruby Sparks is a lovable romantic comedy, with Paul Dano as a novelist who writes a dream girl, and Zoe Kazan -- Dano's real-life partner, who wrote the screenplay -- as the fictional woman who fantastically comes to life, leaving her underwear around his apartment, cooking him eggs.
The film begins with an audacious visual image: a woman we don't yet know is Ruby, dramatically backlit against a bright-yellow sky, walks toward us on screen. When we see that the scene is Calvin's dream, the jolt is so trite it seems like a warning, but turns out to be the film's only let-down. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are the ideal directors for this wispy story. As they did in the more madcap Little Miss Sunshine, they confidently make eccentricity seem endearing when it could so easily have been annoying.
Everyone plays this fantasy without a wink at the audience, but it is Dano (There Will Be Blood) who straightforwardly engages us and holds our attention. Kazan (terrific on stage in The Seagull and on screen in Revolutionary Road) has written what feels like a gift for her boyfriend. Calvin is a blocked writer and an immature guy, but he's not foolish enough to believe in magic, at least not initially. "It's like that movie Harvey, except she's not a giant rabbit," he says, doubting his own sanity, when trying to explain Ruby's appearance to his brother (Chris Messina, solid as ever). Part of Calvin's quirky, endearing character is that he is an anachronism, who uses a typewriter rather than a computer (a magical typewriter?) and has an odd kind of literary celebrity -- a first novel published at 19 that made him famous -- that today happens on screen much more than in life. Everything is just slightly off-kilter.
Kazan's screenplay smartly creates a realistic underpinning, though. The film's central question isn't "Is Ruby real?" but the even trickier follow up: how much will Calvin control her? One little typed phrase, and she's suddenly speaking French, but is total control what he wants? And Ruby increasingly seems to have a will of her own. She wants to be a painter; she wants some space; she knows nothing of her magical-realist origins.
To read more of this review and watch the trailer please go to jamesonscreens.com