Film review: Ruby Sparks

This is a story about a man so brilliant, so self-oblivious and so self-involved that he ends up in a love-hate relationship with a personification of his own mind, says David Larsen.

By David Larsen In Film

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22nd September, 2012

Film review

Paul Dano is an empty suit. He is a human vacuum. There’s nothing wrong with that. In There Will Be Blood, his needy, controlling preacher is the perfect opponent for Daniel Day-Lewis’s charismatic Daniel Plainview. Not because Dano is up to Day-Lewis’s weight, but because the preacher’s lack of substance is so suggestive. It prompts us to see that Plainview, superficially one of the most impressive characters in recent cinema, is just as hollow-souled as his enemy. In Little Miss Sunshine, Dano is equally well cast as the vow-of-silence teen: a sad, still space in ...

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