IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THIS MOVIE, DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILERS, DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW. JUST GO AND WATCH IT FIRST, YOU'LL BE AMAZED
Similar to 'Her' (2013), 'Stranger Than Fiction' (2006), and by a stretch 'Weird Science' (1985); Ruby Sparks is one of those movies that blends fantasy or science fiction with reality in a way that it can make the audience feel like its real - of course, you'd have to stretch your imagination for that to happen.
I consider Ruby Sparks to be a complete movie on its own way - it takes you through a complete journey of misery, to desperation, to dreaming, to happiness, to desolation, into darkness, and back out. It has some great scenes, but much like '500 Days of Summer' (2009); it is not a movie that I could be able to watch it frequently because it is quite heavy in its content -at least for me. So, it being a heavy movie would be my only point against it - which is not bad at all.
Paul Dano plays the character Calvin who is the archetypal nice guy. And I just love the portrayal of that archetype in this movie. He is a nice guy, but he comes in with many flaws to a point that the audience doesn't necessarily have to like him - I didn't. He is incredibly picky with his relationships to the point that he finds himself alone. He is a control freak, and he likes his world a very specific way, and if anyone is to enter it; that other person must adapt. But what makes him so real is that while considering himself to be nice; he is not able to see that he holds many flaws that make him intolerable. And that is what's true with most 'nice' guys. They can be so focused on being nice in order to reach their own concept of being that when they are met with criticism; they shut down to a point that they can be real assholes towards those they claim to care about -- ok, maybe I am talking about myself here.
Working with the qualities of a 'nice' guy; I saw some interviews on the movie, and Zoe Kazan - who plays the female lead (Ruby) and is also the screenwriter - said that the concept of the story was that you can't control the person you love. But I want to go one more. Calvin wrote the idea of this perfect girl, and she grows out of that idea to become a person of her own - which yeah, it is part of the concept. But the idea that Calvin had, the girl that he wrote was who he though he wanted to be with was already destined to leave him. Ruby was already someone who was promiscuous/sexually open since a young age. She was written as a young free spirit, and someone who doesn't like staying in one place. Calvin did not give me the impression that he was anything like that. Moreover, throughout the movie we find that these two are very different in their core. Calvin fell in love with someone that would inevitably leave him. And I think that is what nice guys can do, they fall in love with the idea of someone; and once they are challenged, they can be self-absorbed - meaning that guys who are labeled as 'nice', are in reality not so nice.
My favorite scene is when Calvin comes to terms that Ruby, the character he had been writing, is now real and in the flesh. And he looks at her in wonder and disbelief that it is happening. The face of pure happiness in Calvin, and the face of someone being swept away in Ruby - that whole scene... just watch the movie.
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