Ruby Sparks

Dayton and Ferris’s long-awaited follow-up to Little Miss Sunshine, their incredible 2006 crowd pleaser, is a big disappointment. Written by actress Zoe Kazan for herself and boyfriend Paul Dano, it's a tale of magical realism about a successful young writer whose fictional perfect girlfriend miraculously comes to life.  Wisely, Kazan and the directors don't bog down the story by explaining how the magic occurred, but they fall down the equally hazardous pitfall in this type of film and spend way too much time on Dano's character struggling to believe the situation, and then trying to convince his brother (Chris Messina) to do the same. And though I was impatient with the first half of the film, I was frustrated in a different way when the story developed into a predictable and uninspired second act and then an unpleasant climax. The characters in the film are often too petty to care about, and the cruel turn in the third act is not something that a character as unsympathetic as Dano’s can recover from.

The film's tone is problematic. Kazan and the directors are clearly going for Hal Ashby meets Little Miss Sunshine, but it often feels more like watered-down David O. Russell, or even Judd Apatow. The LA settings are as flat and lifeless as the major sequences, the central set piece with Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas feels like it’s from a totally different film than the rest of the movie, and, although the conclusion doesn’t feel forced, it doesn’t feel believable either. I really wanted to like this movie, but in the end, it just didn't come off the page.