Thursday, August 30, 2012

Film Friday: and Man Created Woman -- the Case of Ruby Sparks

(it's a tad early, but hey, I've got root canal early in the morning...) 

In 1960, an episode of The Twilight Zone -- in fact, the last aired episode of the great first season -- told an amusing tale of a playwright whose Dictaphone appears to have special powers.   Written by Richard Matheson, "A World of His Own" starred Keenan Wynn as the playwright, who must explain to his wife (when she sees him sharing a drink with another woman) that whatever he describes into his machine can magically appear.  And to make it disappear, he just has to toss the tape recording into the fire, and zap! he/she/it's gone.   (That's why the other woman wasn't in the room when the wife entered.)

The wife doesn't believe it -- and when the playwright shows her an envelope with her name on it,  containing a piece of tape that he says is the description he wrote of her, she angrily tosses it into the fire...and disappears.   Wynn's character frantically turns to the machine to re-describe her -- and then changes his mind, describe his new wife with the characteristics of the other woman. 

Men have long been obsessed with creating life -- womb envy, probably.   And in this summer's modest hit romantic comedy, we have the same story played out again: a writer who creates a fictional character who suddenly comes to life. 

But there's an interesting twist: Ruby Sparks, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Feris, was written by a woman, Zoe Kazan.  And to her credit, Kazan manages in her script and in her acting -- she plays the fictional gal-come-to-life -- to create something very fresh and imaginative. 

One of Kazan's "tricks" is to make her male creator, Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano, Kazan's boyfriend), walk the line between sympathetic loner and egomaniacal control freak.  Calvin is feeling the angst of what Fitzgerald plainly called "early success."  Calvin is not likely to follow in Scott's footsteps by drinking himself while gallivanting across Europe -- much easier simply to get a dog and name him after Fitzgerald.  He's written a Salinger-esque first book but nothing has worked since.

Working off dreams he has been having, he begins to create the girl he sees: the dream even gives her a name.  Soon, she is given flesh and personality.   But even as he comes to accept that somehow Ruby is real, Calvin tries hard to shield her. After letting his brother and sister-in-law meet her (mostly to prove to his brother that he's not gone batty), Calvin reluctantly agrees to have Ruby meet his mother (Annette Benning) and her beau (Antonio Banderas -- who seems to be in everything lately). 

Mom, it seems, has gone all hippie since Calvin's dad's passing, but the place she and her woodworker boyfriend share in Big Sur is one of great comfort and affection.  The boyfriend Mort's creations affirm the vision of the artist, but there is a certain kind of freedom to the art and to his relationship with Calvin's mom that Calvin can wrap his mind around. (Not surprising, again, given his name.) 

Creations usually rebel against their creators (I have two kids, I know!).  As Liza did Professor Higgins, as Annie Hall did to Alvy Singer, so Ruby does to Calvin.   Eventually, Calvin confronts Ruby with his author-ity much the way Keenan Wynn's playwright did to his wife somewhere in the Twilight Zone.  But where the tv show episode plays this for humor, Calvin's yo-yo-ing of Ruby comes across as that of a horrific puppet master.  This reinforces the arguments made by Calvin's ex-girlfriend, who herself has become a noted writer since their relationship ended.  

Ruby Sparks is a charming update on the age-old theme of the desire to create art that can supplant life. Think of Alvy Singer's play of his and Annie's romance: he gives it a happy ending, because while real life is not in our control, our art is.  The author-as-God metaphor is a common one enough, too; again Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo is his most poignant expression of it.  Kazan gives a reasonably happy ending for the film, though it does re-emphasize Calvin as Author, despite his having traded in what evidently was a magical typewriter for a Macbook Pro.  

The film also turns back to the notion of the fictional-character-as-alive.   The narrator of Calvin's second novel, The Girlfriend (based on his relationship with Ruby), denies his gifts as a writer on the magnitude of Salinger, but praises the great writers for making their best characters -- Holden Caulfield, Huck Finn, Sethe from Toni Morrison's Beloved -- become a living part of our world.  And indeed it is that engagement with the real world that is the lesson Calvin ultimately learns.  Keenan Wynn's playwright humorously stayed in a world of his own: even when Rod Serling himself shows up at the end of the episode, he's able to make Rod himself disappear! Calvin does not have the pleasures enjoyed by the playwright. He has isolated himself in his sterile home; Ruby -- like all great works of art -- gives Calvin back his life.  And that sense of life is what Zoe Kazan brings us here.




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