PUBLICATION DATE 02/01/94
THE DAILY TEXAN
HEADLINE Ruby in Paradise wastes Judd's talent
Victor Nunez has given us another of those voyage-of-self-discovery movies. The films of this genre chart a character's struggle towards self-actualization, and tend to have rambling plots and touches of forced lyricism. John Sayles' Passion Fish was a paragon of this type, with focus, wit, lush cinematography, and good performances. Nunez's Ruby in Paradise offers an impressive performance from newcomer Ashley Judd (of the incomparable singin' Judd family), but nothing else.
Nothing.
Judd plays Ruby, a woman who flees rural Tennessee, for reasons never fully explored, for Panama City, Florida. Panama City is a beach-front vacation town, but Ruby arrives in the off-season, and it's deserted. She quickly finds a job selling junky souvenirs at a tourist shop. Ruby is courted by a one-dimensional yuppie and a two-dimensional hippie, but she is much more interested in finding herself.
This amateurish, uninvolving film is inexplicably winning accoladesacross the country. Granted, it's an original film from a new writer-director (Nunez), but what makes it original is its languid pace and uncomfortable clunkiness. It's almost an anti-movie.
Everything about Ruby is perfunctory. The characters are stock and the insights are pat. Nunez blankets the film with laconic wryness and touristy kitsch because he somehow senses that this is what hip independent films are supposed to do.
The dialogue is stilted, and Judd spends half of the movie gazing off into space as her disembodied voice reads entries from her diary. It is a tribute to Judd that she manages to look pretty in front of the sessile, unflattering camera. The visual sense is drab and unspeakably hokey throughout. Within the first ten minutes, a character throws out her arms and pirouettes in front of a beautiful sunset. Yawn.
For a voyage-of-self-discovery movie, there is surprisingly little intimacy. The movie's ostensible concern with Ruby's career, her relationships and her sense of self are handled obliquely. When her diary informs us that she enjoys her job and is dissatisfied with her relationships, we are surprised -- no action on the screen prompted these reactions.
Ashley Judd's skillful debut makes Ruby in Paradise bearable for awhile, but the movie refuses to end. The audience at the Village rippled with forced, hopeful chuckles for the first hour. But as the film plodded on and on and on, the now-silent patrons began to fidget in agony, and the theater became a din of squeaking seats.
(two and a half stars out of five)