6 Attempts To Deconstruct The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

3. Ruby Sparks

Sample Dialogue: "You haven't written a person, okay? You've written a girl." Perhaps the least well known film on this list, Ruby Sparks also stands out as being the one and only film here to come from a female authorial voice. The film feels very much the work of its teenage screenwriter Zoe Kazan, who also appears as the eponymous Ruby, a character that meta-fictionally is the in-universe literary creation of novelist Calvin (played by Kazan's real life partner Paul Dano). Ruby is literally the girl of Calvin's dreams, someone that the blocked novelist writes about after he dreams of her and gradually falls in love with the idea of. As he writes that Ruby is also in love with him, she magically comes to life and he has to deal with actually having a real relationship with someone who is more an idea than a real person. Directed by Little Miss Sunshine's husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Ruby Sparks is interesting as a film that attempts to replace a fictional ideal of love with the real thing as produced by a creative team made up of two real world couples. Kazan has denied that the focus of her 'effervescently joyful' character is to deconstruct the MPDG specifically, but did admit that the film and the character are about confronting the way that the male gaze projects an ideal of women that real women struggle to live up to. The more fantastical element of the story makes it feel more of a piece with magical realist metafictions like Stranger Than Fiction, but the strengths of the film are ultimately more in what it has to say about relationships than as a work of fantasy.