Capturing a human being on film-getting life’s evanescence and richness into a fictitious movie character-is one of a filmmaker’s hardest tasks. Yet, in “Ruby in Paradise,” writer-director Victor Nunez and actress Ashley Judd succeed in it almost completely. Together, they’ve drawn a portrait of rural Southern womanhood-Ruby Lee Gissing, Tennessee hill-country girl-that’s both warmly engaging and convincing.
We like Ruby. But, more important, we believe in her, accept her easygoing small-town wariness, her slightly somnolent prettiness, her self-protective resilience. We believe her even when, as people will in life, she behaves in a confounding or less than predictable way.
As Nunez imagines Ruby, and Judd brilliantly fleshes her out, she’s a young woman who immigrates to what first must seem a glittering metropolis, Florida’s Panama City, the Southeast’s “Redneck Riviera.”
To Ruby, it’s a paradise; for most of us, the movie’s title will remain ironic. Surrounded by savannahs and the ocean, Panama City is a onetime spring-break and working-class resort area being swallowed up by condos and gentrification, a city of bars, beaches, seafood restaurants, heat, wet T-shirt contests and innumerable little souvenir shops, in one of which newcomer Ruby badgers herself into a sales job.
We experience Panama City and its people as Ruby does-at first, in a kind of bemused wonderment and, later, with layers of disillusioning shallowness and philistinism successively peeled away. Yet, always, the place retains a magic, partly because Nunez steeps us in real-life sights and sounds, partly because of its significance, for Ruby, as a refuge for a girl lucky, as she says, to get out of the mountains without getting beaten up or pregnant.
Ruby narrates the story-her laconic diary sets the structure-and what she describes is her rite of passage. She meets friend-mentor Rochelle (Allison Dean). She’s pursued by two men, one bad, one good: first, her boss’ wild-life son Ricky (a character nailed by Bentley Mitchum of the Mitchum clan), who chases, seduces and persecutes her; then, Mike McCaslin (Todd Field), Ricky’s opposite number, almost too perfect and considerate. Scion of an old Panama City family, out of step with the present, Mike nurtures her on Jane Austen novels, classical music, ecology, cycle trips and Old South “soul.”
Throughout all this, we believe in Ruby-even though we can see that, as men often do with women who fascinate them, Nunez has idealized her, put her in a story that, ostensibly realistic, has many trappings of fairy-tale or supermarket romance. (There’s even a poetic frame-the mysterious appearance of an Indian servant girl, singing at journey’s beginning and end.) In a way, this is almost Horatio Alger stuff. Ruby no sooner lands in the City than she gets a good job, attracts her boss’ admiration and is wooed by the arch-villain and tender hero of every girl’s fantasy. Real hardships and pain are largely absent.
Yet Nunez goes beneath the archetypes, points out the illusions. And so does Ashley Judd. In a performance remarkable for its ease and restraint, Judd (daughter/sister of the singing Judds) connects us to Ruby’s thoughts and nerves. She doesn’t seem to be selling the character. She simply inhabits the screen, lives out the movie’s time before us. Even the story’s most dubious twist-the curious disintegration of her relationship with Mike at her point of maximum need-bothers us only in retrospect, not while we’re watching her.
“Ruby in Paradise,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the last Sundance Film Festival, may have its flaws, but it’s really a model of low-budget American regional filmmaking. Nunez, a much-admired independent whose Florida filmography also includes “Gal Young Un” (1979) and “A Flash of Green” (1985), uses the freedom that independence can grant just as it should be used. He doesn’t audition for the Big Leagues; he tells, instead, the kind of story the Big Leagues usually don’t, won’t or can’t. He opens up lives, feelings and territory we wouldn’t otherwise see.
Showing us both Ruby and her Paradise in his loving, calm, unexaggerated way, Nunez gives us one of the warmest and most genuinely affirmative American movies of the year.
”RUBY IN PARADISE” (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2
Directed and written by Victor Nunez; photographed by Alex Vlacos; music by Charles Engstrom; costumes by Marilyn Wall-See; production designed by John Iacovelli. An October Films release; opens Friday at Pipers Alley. Running time: 1:55. Not rated by the MPAA. Sexuality, language.
THE CAST
Ruby Lee Gissing………………………………………..Ashley Judd
Mike McCaslin……………………………………………Todd Field
Ricky Chambers………………………………………Bentley Mitchum
Rochelle Bridges……………………………………….Allison Dean
Mildred Chambers………………………………………Dorothy Lyman
