Fox Searchlight Pictures, Bona Fide Productions,
Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Antonio Banderas, Annette Bening, Steve Coogan, Elliott Gould, Chris Messina, Alia Shawkat, Aasif Mandvi, Toni Trucks, Deborah Ann Woll
Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) is a writer. He wrote the great American novel when he was very young, but is now stuck. He’s suffering from writer’s block, and is trying to work through it. As a project given by his therapist, and based upon a dream he had of a loving and understanding girl named Ruby, he begins writing about her, only to find she has come to life and is living in his house. She’s actually real, but he can control her every action, even her personality, by what he writes. But he finds that it’s more difficult to create the perfect girlfriend than he thought.
This is an interesting film. It’s not at all like I expected. I could have been very childish and “Zapped” like, where he writes her into many situations, but this story is very much deeper than that. This is much more like a Twilight Zone episode that has been expanded to full length. In fact, there was an episode a lot like this where a writer dictates the perfect woman to replace his nagging wife. This is very similar to that episode, but with the extended time, we get to look much deeper into mind of both Calvin, and his muse, Ruby, who is a real person who is quite confused at why she acts like she does.
It’s actually a very good character study. There are some lesser characters that have a lot of development as well, such as Calvin’s therapist and his brother who is unhappy in his relationship and very jealous of the power Calvin has to make Ruby into whatever he would like. The problem is that, as in real life, no matter what we think we want, we find we don’t really want it after all. It takes the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, the sweet and the bitter, to appreciate any of it at all. This is very poetic, and I’m sorry to be writing that way, but that’s the message of this entire film. A lighthearted and very enjoyable look at the human existence. Very well done, this is thinker. It’s a film that will let you keep thinking long after you’ve seen it. I really enjoyed this story.
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