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Many movies try to weave a reality from dreams. Ruby Sparks does so literally, as a writer dreams up a partner who seems to fill his every desire. Of course it doesn't work out, but the movie ends with a fluffy smile.
Quite interesting, however, is the film's geneology. Many viewers must have noticed the similarity between this movie's male protagonist and J.D. Salinger. They're both writers whose early first novel, about teenage angst, made them famous. Both then hit the doldrums, unable to emerge from their shells.
J.D.'s famous protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has a name that rhymes with Calvin Weir-Fields, the writer who dreams up Ruby. Perhaps "Weir" alludes to Peter Weir's eligiatic young dream-movie, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Ruby Sparks does not achieve Weir's degree of mesmerization, but at times Ruby allows the audience to wonder where reality begins and ends.
Catcher in the Rye's title comes from Holden Caulfield's mission to "catch" open-hearted children before they fall off the cliff of innocence. Salinger did not seem to accommodate adulthood well; a sort of erudite Peter Pan, he went to a Manhattan Prep school, until his preferences for theater caused his father to pack him off to a military academy. Salinger's roots were not as aristocratic as his character Holden's, and he drifted. At one point he hooked up with Eugene O'Neill's daughter, Oona. He thought she was terribly self-obsessed, but he loved her dearly. Unfortunately she chose Charlie Chaplin instead (for which her dad disowned her.)
Ruby Sparks screenplay was written by its star, Zoe Kazan, whose own background is even richer than Oona O'Neill's. Zoe's grandfather is Elia Kazan, the Director of "On the Waterfront." Kazan was supposed to direct the Broadway production of Catcher in the Rye, until Salinger pulled the plug. Elia's wife, Zoe's grandma, came from the bluest Yankee blood, Yale presidents, Massachusetts and Connecticut 19th century Senators, and a signer of the Constitution.
Zoe, whose own name resembles the title of Salinger's book of stories, Franny and Zooey, has written and starred in a movie that combines the elements of Salinger's enfant terrible, about a writer as self-centered as Oona O'Neill, who conjures up a gamine Charlie Chaplin would love.
But it's really about Salinger. J.D. Salinger's daughter Margaret considered him pathologically self-centered. Her mother, a soft-focused 16-year old, was kept a virtual prisoner in Salinger's secluded house. This is the outline of Ruby Sparks, without the sunny smiles. Margaret wrote that her father's characters were real to him, that his "world of fiction and reality were very blurred." Even her imaginary friends were real to Salinger.
Ruby Sparks doesn't hover between fiction and reality, coming down conclusively that Calvin's character is flesh and blood. Anything resembling Salinger's murky home life would have been more like Eugene O'Neill's tortured dramas, than something Little Miss Sunshine directors would take on. The New York Times lauds Ruby for keeping the laughs "above the waist", unlike Judd Apatow's comedies. Perhaps that's an accomplishment, but Ruby's laughs aren't hard won. There's just too much potential baggage in the weird relationship to sit right as screwball comedy.
Also Calvin's age is obscure; actor Paul Dano looks like he never has to shave, even if he's 30. But it's likely he's supposed to be a decade or more Ruby Sparks's senior, in the script. Salinger was an inveterate, um, seeker of youth. His second wife was younger than his daughter; his third was 50 years younger. Most famously, he exchanged letters with a charming Yale undergrad, Joyce Maynard, who seemed to emerge right from his pen. Maynard spent 10 months living with Salinger, a perfect pet.
Calvin's own creation, Ruby, doesn't have the pedigree or writing skills of Joyce Maynard or Oona O'Neill. In reality, Zoe Kazan does. Calvin's need for self-adulation doesn't require his adulator to be a valid critic. It's made clear his first relationship broke up because he wasn't able to handle a peer writer as a mate. Ruby Sparks pulls its punches by reducing Calvin's girl to a selfless supporter, but Kazan comes across as inherently perceptive.
I didn't go to private school. Instead I worked. That's why I never found Catcher in the Rye so fascinating. But Zoe Kazan, like J.D.Salinger and Holden Caulfield, went to private schools, then Yale (from which Salinger plucked Joyce Maynard. Had he not done so, Maynard would probably have been in Yale's Manuscript Society, as was Zoe Kazan.) I recognize that Salinger's prose holds a power over some young minds, and I suspect Ms. Kazan was one of them.
With Ruby Sparks, she creates a sort of awkward poem that re-imagines Salinger as someone both better, and less, than he was. Directed with sparkle, that's more than enough to satisfy me.
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Martin Turner
Pygmalion, again
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 21, 2015
Magnus Wester
You have to accept that he doesn't ask her who she is
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 17, 2021Amazon Customer
Lovely little film
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 7, 2017Dara C
I loved this film the acting in it was superb from ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 28, 2016
