Product Details

• Actors: Ashley Judd, Todd Field, Bentley Mitchum, Allison Dean, Dorothy Lyman
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Republic Pictures
• VHS Release Date: December 19, 1994
• Run Time: 115 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303026656
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,877 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

An uncommon gem of a film, this story of a young woman finding herself is a marvelous sleeper. Ashley Judd (Kiss the Girls) makes her film debut as Ruby, who moves to a Florida beach town and tries as best she can to earn a living. She begins working in a clothing store and starts dating men, but after some hard choices realizes she must first figure out who she is and what she wants out of life before she settles for something less than she deserves. Writer-director Victor Nunez (Ulee's Gold) tells his tale as an amiable slice of life story without forcing any of the emotion. And Judd gives an astounding performance as a young woman whose quiet inner strength allows her to grow and gain confidence in the person she wants to be. Avoiding all the possible clichés and presenting a positive, realistic, and touching character portrait, Ruby in Paradise is a rare and worthwhile discovery. --Robert Lane

From The New Yorker

Ruby Lee Gissing (Ashley Judd) flees to Florida in search of a new life and finds it in Panama City Beach. There she sells T-shirts and trinkets, and yields to the advances of the loathsome Ricky (Bentley Mitchum) and the well-read Mike (Todd Field). Judd is a fine blend of pushy and graceful, but Victor Nu–ez's script and direction leave her beached. If you like off-season resorts, leaden voice-overs ("Where does caring come from?"), and movies that never seem to end, this one's for you. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ashley Judd's debut film, July 12, 2000

By 

Ed N "Ed" (Kensington, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ruby in Paradise [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Ruby in Paradise is Ashley Judd's first film and, in my opinion, offers her best performance. She certainly deserved a best actress nomination for this role; I believe the only valid reason she didn't receive one was that this was too small a film and slipped by fairly unnoticed by most people and critics alike. While Ashley Judd has seen gone on to become quite a Hollywood celebrity, I do not feel that she has topped her performance in this film. The film itself is fairly straight-forward; it concerns a young girl named Ruby who runs away from an abusive family environment in Tennessee to try to make a new life for herself in a small Floridan ocean resort town. The film details her struggles to establish an identity for herself and to find her niche in life. This film, understandably, is quite character-driven in much the same way as in "Ulee's Gold" (by the same director) or Robert Duvall's "Tender Mercies" or Joan Chen's "Xiu Xiu" (all of which are excellent films). Nothing much happens during the film, yet the film is absorbing in its portrayal of the daily existence of Ruby. We see the slow metamorphosis of Ashley Judd's character from an uncertain girl into one who is more comfortable and has found direction for her life. It is all very subtly done with little nuances in Ashley Judd's performance and delicate, deliberate pacing by the director; nothing is flashed in big bold letters in front of our eyes, and I believe this makes the film all the stronger. The film is not for everyone - those searching for mindless, fast-paced blockbuster action need not apply, but those looking for a strong character-driven story will find much to like in this small gem of a film.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What it means to be working class, September 4, 2004

By 

Mary Ellis (Iowa City, Iowa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ruby in Paradise [VHS] (VHS Tape)

For those of us escaping at an early age because of a loss of family--in the case of Ruby, her mother's death and other implied circumstances--or the need to support ourselves because we do not have parents that can send us to college, this movie is the mirror of our early years. This is especially true of young women who have to work pink-collar or blue-collar jobs while they are trying to find themselves. The precision, the understatement of this movie, the delicate emotions of what relationships can mean to a woman's independence, is what gives it a five star rating and Ashely Judd's performance (her debut) is magnificent. You can't help but feel that her acting is taken from experiences in her own life. What young woman in those circumstances has not found herself making the mistakes Ruby does but yet, she has the inner strength, even in her most desperate moments (unemployed and thinking of being a topless dancer) to grit her teeth and not sell her soul. Yet, this movie is not judgmental--I don't think a viewer who has had to go through those experiences would have thought any less of Ruby for choosing to become a topless dancer just to pay bills, rent, and eat. We are forced at times to make desperate decisions to stay alive.

This should never had been a "sleeper" film. It is the kind of film I would have (if I had children) my daughter or son watch in their adolescent years. For those of us who came from disadvantaged circumstances in the land of opportunity--AMERICA-- it is a documentary of what it means to begin 300 yards behind the starting line of what is considered the normal sequence of events now in our culture--high school, college, a well-paying job, a good marriage, children. What it means when you have to grow up fast (for Ruby, spring break means being able to sell more merchandise--not the easy fling of fun on the beach). Yet there is nothing pitying about this film. It is the triumph of surviving and finding joy in being able to support yourself, and looking at the world through "different" eyes.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough. It soars.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A True Buried Treasure, July 19, 2000

By 

Ken J W Baker - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ruby in Paradise [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I came across this movie some weeks back on a cool, cloudy, drizzly Sunday afternoon (something we've had more than our fair share of in my neck of the woods throughout the late spring and early summer)trip to the neighborhood Blockbuster. I had heard about the film in passing a couple of years earlier apropos of a discussion of the director, Victor Numez's then current feature, Ulee's Gold (which I thought was a worthy, albeit overrated film), and I knew it was the debut movie for Ashley Judd, whom I had long considered not only lovely to look at, but generally vastly superior to the material I had seen her in.

The movie did not disappoint. Judd gives what is probably one of the great "unseen" performances of the '90's. It makes you wonder all the more why she seems compelled to waste her talent in cynical Hollywood tripe like Double Jeopardy (on the other hand she probably was paid more money for one day of her work on that film than she got for all of Ruby in Paradise).

Ruby in Paradise has no real "plot" as such. It opens with a young woman loading up her car and fleeing a young man who it is implied is her husband or (more likely)boyfriend. Why she's leaving and what the circumstances surrounding her getaway are is never made clear or spelled out, and this is deliberate I think, and a wise choice. She winds up in a resort town in southern Florida that she remembers visiting on a family vacation as a child, and from there on, we get to pass through a few months of Ruby's life as she gets a job, makes a couple of new friends, gets briefly involved with a real Mr. Wrong, and then seems to meet a possible Mr. Right, and so forth.

That's really it in a nutshell, but it really doesn't do the experience of watching this fascinating little film justice. Like Seinfeld, a sitcom which was "about nothing" but at it's best was really about everything, Ruby in Paradise lets us experience the life of an initially aimless but determined young woman as she takes her first tentative steps towards full-blown adulthood. By the end of the movie, we have come to know Ruby well enough to feel very pleased by her progress thus far, and wishing we could catch up with her again in a few years and see how she's making out. Indeed, if Ruby in Paradise were a novel instead of a movie, it could definately be the beginning of a series, similar to the "Rabbit" novels of John Updike.

Moreover, although the film is about a female protaganist, and is told entirely from her point of view (indeed, she narrates periodically in voice-over), it is by no means a "chick flick." One of the numerous pleasures of the film is how it sidesteps, or puts a different spin on, all the various cliches we've come to expect (and even accept)in this genre.

This film is probably not for everybody. It was obviously a low-budget affair, and has the grainy look of being possibly shot in 16 mm and then blown up. It is also VERY low-key, especially the first half-hour or so. But, if you've got a couple of free hours, and you feel like checking out something other than the whiz-bang flicks on the new releases shelf, this movie offers a lot of quiet, thoughtful pleasure.