Ruby Sparks ( Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, 2012) *

Well, isn’t this a love-in? Husband-and-wife directors cast real-life couple Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan to play onscreen twosome in schmaltzy shocker. There may be a precious symmetry in screenwriter Kazan writing a role for her partner, for him in turn to write one for her- but, having pilfered plotlines from Stranger than Fiction and The Twilight Zone episode ‘A World of His Own’, she has created a rather literal, and surely dangerous, take on intellectual copyright.

Dano plays precocious author Calvin Weir-Fields; with his breakthrough success a decade behind him, we find him cruelly inflicted by that most devastating and important disease of all, writer’s block.  Living with his dog, Scotty, in an apartment as IKEA-white as the blank page slotted into the typewriter before him, his days are spent begging for a muse while lapping up the last scraps of applause for anniversary-edition audiences. After his therapist (Elliott Gould, barely onscreen for five minutes) suggests a writing exercise about Scotty, Calvin suddenly finds inspiration from a red-haired girl (Kazan) who can’t get enough of the dog- or his owner. Her name is Ruby Sparks: she’s endlessly smiling, enchantingly spontaneous… and she doesn’t exist. Despite (or rather, due to) living purely in Calvin’s thoughts, serving only to transform his dreams into tomorrow’s chapters, Ruby is the perfect girl. Every night she declares her love for him, and every morning he rushes straight to the typewriter. After a few days of inexplicably finding items of women’s clothing scattered around his house like a trail of crumbs, Calvin wakes one morning to find her, exactly as he had described her, standing in his kitchen.

Ruby sees Calvin not as her maker but as her soulmate, as stunned by his astonishment as he is of her appearance. The fact that other people can see and hear Ruby only makes Calvin question his sanity further. Yet it seems the only way of convincing his sceptic brother, Harry (Chris Messina), is to invite him to see for himself. In doing so, the two men stumble upon an incredible discovery: Ruby has strangely, but spectacularly, sprung to life from the seeds of Calvin’s imagination. Whatever he writes about Ruby almost instantaneously takes effect. In the hands of a conceited creator, such omnipotence is irresistible, and, after briefly dismissing the ensuing pangs of guilt, Calvin soon finds himself in a relationship that he can control at the (keyboard) click of his fingers…

Mistakenly pitched as a romantic comedy, Ruby Sparks, like its titular toy, undergoes something of an identity crisis. How can a film that spouts such syrupy nonsense as ‘‘Falling in love is an act of magic. And so is writing’’ attempt to wring laughs from the malicious streak of misogyny that suffuses almost every scene? Ruby is created, essentially programmed, only to please Calvin; so of course she would be attractive, a great cook- and, most importantly, intellectually inferior to him. He resents her independence, so reduces her to a needy and insecure wreck who clings and cries like an infant. When this too becomes unbearable, he ‘grants’ her freewill but immediately misses the adulation and so reverts, literally, to type. This cycle continues until culminating in the film’s most repugnant scene; Calvin demonstrating his control over Ruby by making her scream all that she finds desirable in him, before collapsing and practically melting like the Wicked Witch. Such cruelty typifies his relentless narcissism (as both an author and a lover), yet it’s a trait he unfathomably shares with his creation. But then again, Ruby isn’t entirely of his own conception: her assembly-line whimsy and exasperating impulsiveness make her the most literal interpretation of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope yet. Despite Kazan’s aversion to the term being applied to Ruby, her attempt to emulate the charm of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and (500) Days of Summer, after Zooey Deschanel had not only embodied but emphatically buried the stock character through her performance in the latter, does not invite flattering comparisons.

Calvin’s trademark misanthropy is practically excused by the sheer unpleasantness of his supporting cast. From his New Age parents, (Antonio Banderas, slightly oblivious to his surroundings, and Annette Bening, rehashing her role in The Kids Are All Right) to his shady agent (Steve Coogan), not a single character warrants our interest- or even their inclusion to the plot. Rarely has a film (especially a rom-com) required you to rank the necessity of every performance, but here the votes are undeniably tied between the leading couple themselves. With his permanently perplexed expression of a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, unsure whether to expect a punishment or a reward, Dano has found a snug niche in the arm-flailing, over(re)acting  Chandler Bing school of smarm. And while there’s a hint of the clumsy cuteness of a younger Kristen Schaal in her turn as Ruby, Kazan’s script bears an uncomfortable sadomasochism in its portrayal of a woman suppressed by sexist ideals.

Ruby Sparks inhabits a place of wanton wish-fulfilment (although, for a writer, Calvin has a startling lack of imagination), peerless predictability and where conflict is caused, and resolved, with the frantic pressing of a typewriter. While the film’s obsession around the object itself evokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous aphorism about dangerous weapons (a finger hovering above the delete key would presumably be less dramatic), the wish for Calvin to type the film’s ending considerably sooner sadly goes unheeded.

©D.Wakefield, 2012.

La Piel que Habito/The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar,2011) * *

The best urban legends are the ones that, after you’ve allowed yourself a few sceptical laughs at the absurdity of it all, creep into your mind and convince you  that they could happen, after all. For his first foray into horror, Almodóvar has adapted Thierry Jonque’s novel Tarantula, but he seems to have these responses in the wrong order. And while this review may tiptoe around the finer details, this is purely to keep the surprises intact. So go and see the film, grumble at the irrationality of it all and then read this, eh?

To discover that the great director of Spanish melodrama (not to mention the most commercially successful director the country has ever produced) has jumped genres is indeed an eye-opener. But anyone hoping for a welcome remedy to the proliferation of Saws, Hostels and the execrable Human Centipede: First Sequence may have to look elsewhere. For while Almodóvar considers his film to be ‘‘a horror without screams,’’ this isn’t strictly true. The ‘big reveal’ could easily be the product of Eli Roth’s (mis)reading of feminist theory. And that’s the closest you’ll get to a spoiler. No, a more appropriate description would be a horror without limits, for despite being set in a technologically advanced Toledo of 2012, this is sci-fi with the emphasis strongly on fi. A Hammer horror with scalpels and syringes.

Antonio Banderas plays plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard, a man whose ambitious but unorthodox designs sandwich him firmly between the two doctors Frankenstein and Moreau. After discovering the possible benefits of transgenesis (fusing together human and animal genes) to create a more resilient skin, he experiments on his guinea pig, Vera (Elena Anaya). Vera, however, is a beautiful young woman who, for reasons unexplained to both her and us, is held captive in Ledgard’s mansion-cum-clinic and monitored, almost obsessively, via closed- circuit surveillance. Hers is, unsurprisingly, an unhappy existence: her self-harm wounds are re-sewn by the doctor (who rebukes her selfishness with the unblinking authority you’d expect from a psychopath) and she’s back to square one. Or not quite…  There’s certainly something odd about this relationship- aside from the obvious Stockholm syndrome and bonding over the occasional skin graft- and, as the plot unfolds like a roll of gauze, we find that it only gets odder. You’d better brace yourself for when we reach the end.

In a story that jumps back and forth in time, and more than once politely asks that you save your questions for later, let’s just focus on the one scene that doesn’t give the game away.  Robert is away on business, leaving housekeeper Marilia ( Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes), to receive a surprise visit from her son, Zeca (Roberto Álamo); a scarred, bald-headed and noticeably tiger-costumed brute of a man who has strayed from the local carnival. He manipulates his mother into letting him into the house, before revealing his true intentions. He switches on the TV to show, right on cue, news footage of a jewellery shop heist. Wouldn’t you know it: Zeca’s oh-so- distinctive mugshot is caught on camera. Wouldn’t it be awfully neat if a spot of reconstructive surgery could fool la policía for just a little longer? But, Marilia explains, as the doctor is out, it has been a wasted journey. But Zeca has spotted some incriminating CCTV footage of his own: Vera stretching for yoga, oblivious to the fact that, downstairs, a man with a striped tail is licking ‘her’ on the screen. Here, as the shivers slip down the spine, we see that what we initially considered to be Almodóvar’s prize-winning entry for ‘campest Bond villain’ is in fact a genuinely unsettling savage. After a tortuous game of cat and mouse – he steals the keys and skulks from room to room, sniffing out his prey- he pounces on Vera and, to complete the analogy, becomes more animal than man.  It is only upon Robert’s return that the true extent of the doctor’s obsession, and his burning need for revenge, is fully realised.  To say anything more would spoil a storyline that, for all its initial promise of originality and, for the most part, twitching suspense, soon falls into a one-note farce.

Marilia is given the cumbersome task of informing Vera (and us) of Robert’s past; but chipping away at this big chunk of exposition whilst huddled around a garden campfire seems, in hindsight, a tad insensitive. After being struck by not one, not two but three personal tragedies, Robert’s misplaced sense of vigilantism spirals uncontrollably from a knee-jerk reaction to a carefully contrived counterstrike. Suddenly Job wants to play God. And so, with a serenely sadistic belief in ‘corrective justice’ that is taken a little too literally, Robert’s revenge isn’t a dish served cold; it’s a buffet.

Much has been made about the fact that this film marks Almodóvar’s reunion with his one-time muse, Banderas, (together for the first time since 1990’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!)  but if only the pairing would’ve produced a more auspicious result. While the frenetic egotism of cinema’s ‘mad scientist’ is admittedly a relic from B-movies and comic book villains, the modern equivalent- the dead-eyed but driven professional psycho- also risks death by overexposure. Recent examples, the most notable (if unsurprising) being Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, have but replaced the hockey mask with a pinstripe suit. Banderas’ Ledgard wears a white lab coat.

The film really belongs to Anaya; half living doll, half loaded gun; it is she who carries the suspense, who begins the film as a mystery but ends as a…ah, that’s the closest you’ll get to a spoiler. But even a late exploration into her captivity serves only to illustrate her Jekyll-and-Hyde readiness to take refuge in her four walls mixed with her propensity for violence. Her cell becomes her sanctum becomes her cell again.

Ultimately, the film’s main flaw is in its tendency to tie all the loose ends haphazardly together. Resolutions are convenient, revelations convoluted. Without wishing to go into the details, Robert’s plan of retribution doesn’t seem suitable, let alone sufficient, closure. And while the final scene unfolds slowly and with a teasing uncertainty (perversely ending with the most gripping encounter thus far), it is overshadowed, moments earlier, by an ending that renders the previous ninety minutes into nothing but an extended exercise in ‘what if’? Improvident, but impossible. Satisfied, but not satisfying.

©D.Wakefield, 2011.