INFINITELY POLAR BEAR
DIRECTOR: Maya Forbes
CAST: Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Ashley Aufderheide, Imogene Wolodarsky
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG DL
RUNNING TIME: 88 minutes
RATING: ***
A serio-comic portrait of a family coping with one parent’s mental illness, Maya Forbes’s autobiographical Infinitely Polar Bear shares, through many childhood memoirs a slightly rose-tinted view of its subjects.
Forbes doesn’t shy away from the hazards and embarrassments faced by two young sisters being cared for solely by their bipolar father (Ruffalo). But she feels honour-bound to balance each scary memory with a happy one in ways one might not if not writing about parents one loves. By draping those happy scenes in Theodore Shapiro’s aggressively cheerful score, she puts a finger on the scales, pushing us into sharing her view of a child-raising plan we might otherwise find fault with. The result is a feel-good picture that is a little less affecting than it might have been, but is entertaining enough that – especially with Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana as the leads – it stands a fine chance with mainstream moviegoers.
Ruffalo plays Cam, a man of many gifts whose manic-depression (as it’s termed when we meet him in the late ’60s) prevents him from achieving much or even holding down a job. Wife Maggie (Saldana) doesn’t mind this much when they marry, creating an idyllic home in the Cambridge, Massachussetts, area. But by the time they have primary school-age daughters, Cam’s behaviour grows erratic enough that they separate: he’s institutionalised briefly, and when he’s released the plan is that he will live away from the family but see the girls often.
Maggie, unwilling to see her daughters be unchallenged in a public school but unable to pay for a private one, hatches a plan: she scores admission to Columbia Business School, where she can earn a degree in 18 months, then get a job that pays enough to manage private-school tuition. The problem is that Columbia is in New York City. She decides that Cam will care for the girls full-time in Cambridge, and she’ll travel home on weekends to help out.
A few assumptions go unquestioned here. Is it worth splitting a family apart for a year-and-a-half in order to send children to an elite school? Was there really not a business programme anywhere in the college-stuffed Cambridge area that would admit Maggie, making the split unnecessary?
The one question the film does engage is the wisdom of entrusting young Faith and Amelia to the care of a man fresh from institutionalisation. Cam fails many tests in the early weeks of the arrangement: he leaves the house while the girls are asleep, going out for hours to get drunk; he abandons housekeeping; he’s so intent on trying to befriend neighbours in the family’s new apartment building that he alienates every resident. His love for the girls is never in doubt, but even after some seeming steps toward responsibility, he’s the kind of dad no child-welfare officer would tolerate.
Ruffalo makes the character sympathetic and believable, more often entertaining in his erratic behaviour than troubling; the film needs the laughs his missteps offer. But the home Cam creates is, as his daughters angrily attest, a “sh**hole” they are ashamed of. The girls see how his pushy gregariousness is making others avoid the family; they beg their mother to return.
But before things get so bad that viewers seriously question Maggie’s values, Cam has for the most part turned things around: once-bullying neighbour children are charmed by his eccentricity, and even bouts of depression don’t stop the girls from keeping the household running. The world is inarguably home to many families that thrive in conditions others would find outrageous, and from all appearances, Forbes’s was one of them. But one suspects the happy ending was a bit harder to come by than Infinitely Polar Bear makes it look.
Hollywood Reporter
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