Ruby Sparks

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On to the review!
           

            If you could create the perfect mate and adjust their behavior whenever you wanted, would you?

            That's the question that Ruby Sparks asks.  Fortunately, the answer is messy.  Unfortunately, so is the movie.

            Ruby Sparks starts off by introducing us to Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano), a talented young writer who was first published at the tender age of 19.  A decade later, he's a stern, depressed man-child with no friends and a mile-long streak of mental martyrdom.  He loathes the fact that all the girls he meets just want to get him to bed because he's a famous writer, yet he makes no real attempts to actually, y'know, meet people.

            Despite the fact that his brother, Harry (Chris Messina), does his best to get him outside while his therapist Dr. Rosenthal (Elliot Gould) actively encourages his imagination, Calvin refuses to do anything about his current lot in life.

            Then he begins dreaming about a beautiful girl.  After a few dreams he can't help himself and begins to write a love story about her.  As he gets more and more descriptive with her personality, her past, and their relationship, something strange happens.  The girl becomes real.  The girl is perfect.

            But here's the problem with perfection: it doesn't exist.  Even the most beautiful, fun, smart, loving person has their bad days.  Every relationship has its downs.  It's the nature of two people trying to share one life.  They both have wants and needs and sometimes they don't match up with what their partner wants.

            This is where Ruby Sparks both shines and horrifies.  The middle part of the movie plays out like (500) Days of Summer without the mixed-up timeline.  Calvin and Ruby are the ideal happy couple until cracks start to appear in the relationship.  While Ruby tries to deal with this like an actual adult, Calvin can't help but go back to his manuscript and start to tweak it, changing Ruby in the process.

            While the tweaks are effective, so too were the effect of those tweaks on myself (heretofore referred to as 'the audience' because damnit, I'm important).  The audience is forced to watch a selfish bastard with low self esteem try to salvage his relationship by using a cheat code rather than actually work at it.

            Without revealing too much (more), things go basically the way the audience expects.  there are ups and downs, some laughs and a lot of confusion.  That is, until the final scene.  All I am willing to say is that it takes everything the movie seemed to be saying about working on a relationship, shit on it, set it on fire, piss on it, throw it in the sewers.

            Ruby Sparks does a lot well, like not wasting small supporting roles by Steve Coogan, Antonio Banderas and Annette Bening.  It also delivered quite a few solid scenes and fantastic acting by Paul Dano.  But despite all of its gut-wrenching twists and turns, its ending quite honestly made me angry at the entire damn thing.

            Much like recent horror movies like The Last Exorcism and Paranormal Activity 3, Ruby Sparks is a movie that could have been almost perfect if they had just thrown away the last scene.