Published October 2, 2023

“Ruby in Paradise” is 30 years old, which blew my mind when I realized it, and a nice, round number like that is sometimes all it takes for me to watch a movie again. That I’d forgotten the involvement of Todd Field and that the entire thing was conceived and directed by Victor Nunez, and that he gave Jane Austen a co-writer credit, set up some rewards for me when I re-watched it over my birthday weekend.

The photo above is not from “Ruby in Paradise,” but of the images in my media library, it perhaps best captures the vibe of the title character’s reflections on life as she adjusts to her new surroundings.

The movie is about a young woman who leaves Tennessee after her mother dies and other, unspecified problems push her away, leading her to drive until she settles in the Florida Panhandle. This part of an August 2022 story touches on some of my misgivings about it decades after first seeing it:

The Sunshine State wasn’t necessarily where Ruby planned to end up, high-tailing it out of Tennessee for reasons Nunez remains vague about throughout the drama, but it becomes a backdrop for some soul-searching as Ruby floats between the affections of two men, the other being the son (Bentley Mitchum) of the gift shop owner (Dorothy Lyman), and the paradox of being surrounded by carefree vacationers without having the financial means to take a break herself. While it’s unfortunate the film hasn’t aged a day in its consideration of the working class and particularly the inequity that leads women to pay the most for the dream of security, “Ruby in Paradise” now has a picture to match after being restored to its original luster for a digital rerelease last year, rectifying one of the more egregious home video disappearing acts of recent memory when the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner didn’t make it beyond LaserDisc in the U.S.

I stumbled upon the movie for the first time while channel surfing in late November or early December 1995 when I was house- and cat-sitting, a story and context that would make for a good movie on its own. I did not know who Ashley Judd was. “Heat” was still a few weeks from being released, and “Ruby in Paradise” was only her second movie. I had not seen “Kuffs,” her first.

Whatever it was that made me stop and watch, she and her narration drew me in, as did the rest of the movie. She got my attention, and the movie made a lasting impression.

I did not immediately make the connection that “Northanger Abbey,” which comes up in the movie, was so intimately a part of the creation of “Ruby in Paradise” that Jane Austen would be listed with Nunez as one of the two writers. (The story linked earlier in this post explains some of how that happened.)

Indeed, Ruby finds herself constantly having to assess character as she tries on a new world and a new persona, free from her previous constraints. She giggles after repeating what the meteorologist on a local TV newscast says before a commercial break, trying on the words and the voice/register for size.

Who is she? Where is she going? What are the things that will limit what she can become?

They are questions Roger Ebert seemed to have pondered in writing his review.

There is an important scene where Milfred takes her to a retail convention in Tampa, and at another table Ruby sees a young woman like herself, carrying a briefcase, engaged in a business meeting. At that instant, I think, Ruby stops thinking of her job as mere employment, and realizes it is a career.

I’m not sure they could have cast a more perfect Ruby. And as Nunez said in the interview I mentioned earlier, “what Ashley knows — it’s in her pores — is about growing up in the South. That was it. I, of course, never looked back.”

Ruby talks her way into a job at a Panama City Beach shop where tourists buy T-shirts and hats and suntan lotion and trays that say “Sunrise in Paradise” and “A Day in Paradise” and “Sunset in Paradise.” It sells the necessities and trappings and fantasies and keepsakes of spring break and summer vacation. Ruby is good at retail, she says, and she finds herself gradually proving that to the shop’s owner.

There were so many candidates to be the main quote I wanted to emphasize here.

“So far, fun has been nothing but work,” we hear Ruby say, a way of letting us know what she is writing in her journal as she is trying to figure out her life.

“It’s been a long time since one kiss made my lips hum. I can still feel it.”

Later, about the person behind that kiss: “I always feel good around him. He’s like that red and blue sweater I had when I was 13. So perfect. I wanted to wear it all the time, even when it got hot. Not always a pleasant feeling.”

At a low moment: “Too close to feeling gone.”

Watching a TV preacher as he explains that Jesus knows we want limits imposed on our lives, she tells the man with the kiss that made her lips hum: “You can’t have that kind of comfort without the hell threat come in somewhere.” And as if on cue, the preacher gets right to it: “Obey and be saved in love. Turn away and be damned for all eternity.” To which she says: “My family bought it all — hook, line and sinker. I grew up with the security and certainty of living in the law. I also know the guilt and shame it can bring. Nothing is ever gonna get that kind of hold on me again.”

Persefina, a co-worker at an industrial laundry where Ruby finds herself after an unfair firing, seeing her close to becoming numb as she starts to master the job: “Don’t worry. Pretty soon you won’t feel a thing.”

Reflecting on how her surroundings changed but the questions stayed the same: “Like, where does caring come from? Can we ever know our true desires? And why are we, all of us, so often lonely and afraid? The answers are probably real simple, real close, smiling somewhere quiet-like, waiting for us.”

The winner, though, connects a lot of pieces of the movie that resonate for me now and, if there is such a thing, come together in a way that must be acknowledged as not so much having come together as painfully reminding us that such pieces probably never can in a way that feels harmonious or satisfying.

Somewhere I heard that hell is when all your dreams come true. Maybe it’s because you find out they won’t all go together, or that there’s always sides you can’t see when you’re dreaming away.”

Almost 30 years after seeing “Ruby in Paradise” for the first time, I watched it online under decidedly different circumstances. The “free with ads” commercials for other shows or movies were so LOUD and such an assault on my brain and desire for calm that it helped me understand how it drew me in long ago. This movie is the opposite, so it’s no wonder it appealed to me.

Movies like “Ruby in Paradise” and “Nomadland” and others with quiet and talk and gentle narration and reflection, they appeal to me because they are so much like my life. They are like the stories I aspire to write. People trying to sort it all out. People on the journey. People maybe never getting to the destination or even knowing where it is or what it would look like if they did.

A trans woman in hiding could see “Ruby in Paradise” two decades before coming out and feel the tickle, the itch, the questions, the unresolved tension, and then revisit it six years after coming out and find it lands in a number of new ways. If it lacks the depth that its first impression seemed to indicate and embed, and didn’t stand the test of time in ways that few films could, it holds up in other ways that quench a long-endured thirst for reconnection.

I get Ruby, and I think on some level, she would get me. You can call something paradise, but there’s a reason it’s a place where people visit for a short time before returning to real life. To live there permanently is a whole other story.

Photo by TAVEESUK via Shutterstock.