'Ruby' Almost a Gem

Directed by Victor Noouns; October Films; Unrated

Ruby in Paradise" is a film in the style of "Gas, Food, Lodging"--that is, a let's-define-and-celebrate-the-woman-of-the-90's cinematic elegy. Both films take place in warm, Southern, laid-back American climes, closely examine the dilemmas of females in their milieus and prescribe a "back to nature", "be content with who you are" approach to healing. But whereas the earlier film espouses a traditional family and community ethic, the protagonist of "Ruby in Paradise" finds peace of mind in individuality and self-reliance.

Ruby Lee Gissing (Ashley Judd) is a high-school graduate who leaves her native Tennessee town--a place she claims she was lucky to escape without getting beat up or pregnant--to start a new life in Panama Beach City, Florida. She quickly finds a job selling souvenirs at Chamber's Beach Emporium and has a quick fling with the manager's heartthrob, fast-lane-living son Ricky. Ruby senses immediately that he is just the sort of guy she left Tennessee to escape and quickly regroups to examine her priorities. The film is narrated with excerpts from Ruby's diary, which records experiences, the personalities she encounters and her gradual self-understanding as she ekes out a life and learns to "survive with her soul intact."

As Ruby herself so deftly puts it, it doesn't matter whether you live in the country or the city, whether you're in souvenir sales or corporate business--the big questions remain the same. In depicting this proud girl's experiences, "Ruby in Paradise" becomes a picture essay of life in the South Florida resort town and offers some 1990s answers to age-old dilemmas. For example, when Ruby is visiting her new boyfriend, Mike, at the plant nursery where he works, she remarks on how perfect the boss's family appears, but quickly adds that it is the woman who always seems to bear the burden for this serenity.

She comes to this understanding in the course of her own relationship with Mike, who tries to convert her to his ways--love of nature, literature, gloom and doom skepticism and a dose of televangelism. He only becomes overbearing as she realizes her wants and needs are different. In a reposeful moment in bed with him, she wryly thinks to herself, "We are all suckers for the tender, cozy life." Gradually she pulls away from this relationship. Ruby has always been comfortable with herself, she has always relied on herself to get through life, but by the film's end her self-reliance has become a pleasure and comfort and not just a necessity.

Ashley Judd's Ruby is a very strong, sensitive and believable character. Judd's performance carries the film, as some of the other characters are often caricatures or embody exaggerations of a personality trait. Some of the dialogue is so extreme as to be simply unbelievable. At times, Ruby seems to be the lone sane person immersed in a sea of irrationality.

The cinematography is beautiful; the sunsets, waterway and beach scenes echo the point that the film is making about beauty, truth and wholesomeness. The slow pace of the film and the dialogue is evocative of small-town Southern life. Often the detail is excrutiating. By the end of the film, the audience probably remembers a few too many colorful, tacky items of merchandise for sale at Chamber's. The camera often drags and makes us impatient with this meticulous attention to detail. When we see Mike's library, the camera pauses too long at the bookshelves and overemphasizes the point that pleasure-reading is a new concept for Ruby.

"Ruby in Paradise" is clearly a very contemporary attempt to adress the "big questions," like "Gas, Food, Lodging" before it. In that film, the protagonist finds fulfillment in embracing traditional femininity. Both of these films are reactive responses to the issues brought up by the radical feminism of the 70's. While both stories try to escape the idea of "woman as the oppressed," "Ruby in Paradise" comes closer to achieving this while preserving the positive feminist goal of mental and spiritual independence.