Film: Ruby Sparks

Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) is a writer, hailed as a genius by almost everyone except himself, who knew great success with a book he penned a decade ago. Since, he has struggled to find the form that catapulted him to fame, not aided by the fact that he has recently broken up with his girlfriend. He starts seeing a therapist to help get the ink flowing and eventually gets the better of his writer's block with a novel about a young girl, his dream girl, Ruby Sparks. Working mostly late at night, for inspiration for the book comes only in his dreams, Weir-Fields suddenly can't stop typing and the words pretty much write themselves.

One day the still young writer comes home to find a girl in his apartment. Stunned to say the least, he starts chatting to the girl and realises that in fact Ruby has come to life and is no longer his dream girl; she is in fact his actual girlfriend. It of course takes him some time to get to grasps with this seemingly impossible situation and in the process puzzles the young girl as of course she has no idea why it is so remarkable for the writer - as far as she is concerned this has been the situation for as long as she can remember.

Calvin confides in his brother who dismisses the story outright and seeks to persuade him to visit a psychologist. Insisting he isn't making the whole thing up, the novelist convinces his sibling to come to the house to meet Ruby to see her with is own eyes. Skeptical, he agrees and is just as astonished as his brother first was when she turns out to exist. That night it occurs to the brothers that seeing as Calvin has up until now written Ruby's story, as fiction and, as it turns out, non-fiction, by continuing his story on paper he may well be able to actually control the girl. They excuse themselves to go upstairs to Calvin's typewriter and add a line to the story where Ruby starts to speak French and sure enough when they go back downstairs Ruby is speaking fluent French. They test the method several times and her behaviour follows exactly the words on the page.

However, Calvin decides to stop writing his novel as the dream girl he depicts in it cannot be bettered in his mind. Things go swimmingly for a while, although when they take a turn for the worse the writer gives in to temptation and starts controlling Ruby again through words, but with undesired consequences.

Ruby Sparks is an original scenario, certainly, although at times belief in the story (despite its impossibility) is questioned by some over-acting in the first half of the picture. It improves drastically in the second half with less comedy and more drama with the consequences of Ruby's apparition and the writer's controlling becoming stark. Zoe Kazan, who plays Ruby, shows great versatility in her role while the rest of the cast, which includes Steve Coogan, is for the most part on form. While there are some laughs towards the start of the film, these are cancelled out somewhat by some pretty cheesy moments. That said, some of the more cutting moments later in the film are so good as to make us forget these and our overall impression of the film will be taken from its perhaps predictable yet logical finish.