thoughts on Ruby Sparks (spoilers)

Paul Dano stars as Calvin Weir-Fields, a writer who is regarded a genius but can't get anywhere on the second novel he is supposed to be working on.  He seems to be in a bit of a slump, in general.  His girlfriend of five years has left him.  He doesn't really have any friends other than his brother, Harry (Chris Messina).  He got his dog, Scotty, because he thought that Scotty would help him get out and meet people; however, Scotty is scared of strangers and "pees like a girl."  One day, Calvin's therapist, Dr. Rosenthal (Elliott Gould), suggests that Calvin should write about someone who likes Scotty just as he is. 

He comes up with Ruby (Zoe Kazan), a painter from Dayton, Ohio, and finds himself really enjoying writing about her; at one point, he confesses that he thinks that he's falling in love with her, and that he looks forward to writing just so that he can spend time with her.  He lets Harry read what he has so far, and Harry tells him that the woman he has created is completely unrealistic.  Real women, Harry points out, have real flaws, not just quirks that make them endearing (Harry's wife, for example, is sometimes "mean as shit for no reason," Harry says).  Regardless, one morning when Calvin wakes up, Ruby has materialized as if out of thin air and is, for all intents and purposes, real.  Calvin is skeptical at first, but eventually he accepts that this has happened, and she becomes his girlfriend.  He only lets Harry in on the secret that he has created her; when Harry learns that Calvin can make Ruby do whatever he wants simply by writing it, he encourages Calvin to take advantage of this.  Calvin swears that he will never write about her again and will let her be, and he sticks to this for quite some time.  Eventually, though, he changes his mind, though every way he tries to change her backfires.  When she wants to spend more time apart, he writes that she is miserable without him...and she becomes so clingy that he can't even go to the bathroom or answer the phone.  He then writes that she is "effervescently happy"...but she remains so no matter what he does, whether he wants to leave her or wants to hole up in the house.

Calvin is a deeply flawed character.  This isn't to say that he's poorly written or unrealistic; however, I found him too off-putting to care about.  For example, Harry points out that he didn't give Ruby realistic flaws; I found it more disturbing that Calvin gave her no life outside of him.  She's supposedly a painter, but we never see her paint.  At one point, Calvin discourages her from going out and getting a job.  She is an orphan.  Now, he has no idea that she's going to come to life at the time he determines this detail, so it's not like he makes her an orphan so that he'll never have to meet her parents, or anything...but why, as a writer, did he not want/think to create people from her past?  Is this supposed to be a comment on how a lot of women in films aren't really well-developed or well-thought-out?  Perhaps, but Ruby isn't perfect enough or shallow enough to be a parody of the typical woman in, say, a romantic comedy (Jennifer Garner's character in The Invention of Lying comes closer to that); it just really seems like Calvin can't deal with a woman with a full life that doesn't revolve around him.  At one point, we meet his ex-girlfriend, Lila (Deborah Ann Woll), and she basically says as much-- that he had this idea of what she was supposed to be like and got upset when she didn't conform to it. 

He seems to impose this on everyone in his life, from Scotty to his mother (Annette Bening), who has apparently changed a lot since Calvin's father's death, but who seems happy, and whose new husband (Antonio Banderas) seems like a nice enough guy, if a bit new-agey.  It's a very unattractive character trait, though I wonder if it could have been made more understandable with a different actor or with more backstory.  It seems that this need to control everyone around him might have developed with his father's death, but since we're seeing everything from Calvin's perspective, we don't get any scenes where other characters discuss whether this is a recent change.  Or maybe Ruby could have asked him some questions about his past and pulled this out of him...but Calvin doesn't seem interested in having deep conversations with her or getting to know her, just in having her behave exactly as he wants her to.  It's frustrating.  Calvin does eventually set Ruby free, but it's unclear whether he really learns anything from the experience, or if the whole thing just gives him fodder to finish his novel.

I didn't particularly care for it.  It's kind of an interesting idea, and I always like Chris Messina; however, I just had too many problems with Calvin as a character.