It’s easy to have some misgivings going into Infinitely Polar Bear, a film that’s being marketed as a wacky, heartwarming comedy about a family struggling with the father’s bipolar disorder. It’s much harder to maintain those misgivings once the film’s gentle charms take hold.
Chief among those charms is the cast, led by the ever-reliable Mark Ruffalo as Cam Stuart, a Boston blueblood who, we’re told, was diagnosed in 1967 with what was then known as manic depression. A zippy prologue, composed of home-movie footage and narrated by Cam’s oldest daughter, Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky, the director’s daughter), tells us that Amelia’s mom knew all about Cam’s nervous breakdowns and married him anyway because, well, it was the ’60s and everyone was “bananas.”
The story begins in earnest a decade later, with a pair of scenes that juxtapose Cam’s highs and lows. One minute he’s all exuberance and whimsy, leading the girls on a mushroom-hunting expedition in the woods to celebrate his latest job loss. The next, he’s half-naked and raving, disabling the engine of the family car while his wife and daughters lock themselves inside, clearly afraid for him, if not necessarily of him.
That’s about as overtly dark as the movie gets, though there are plenty of challenges ahead for Cam and his family. While he’s institutionalized, his wife, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), is forced to move Amelia and her sister, Faith (Ashley Aufderheide), from their bucolic country home to a rent-controlled inner-city apartment. Dissatisfied with the local public school and unable to find a decent-paying job in Boston, Maggie applies to and is accepted by Columbia’s MBA program. Since she can’t afford to take the girls to New York with her, she leaves them in the care of the recovering (but not quite there yet) Cam. Everyone—including Cam, who’s also an alcoholic—seems to think this is a bad plan, but he soon cottons to the idea and enters full-on Mr. Mom territory. That his illness will eventually rear its head is never in question; we only wonder when it will happen, and how bad it will be.
Infinitely Polar Bear is a largely autobiographical film, and an auspicious debut for writer/director Maya Forbes. Forbes made the film partly because Wes Anderson urged her to do so, and that’s telling in and of itself; there are moments when the movie feels a little too calculated in its indie-quirk affectations, a little too pointedly whimsical.
Forbes is quick to make the necessary course corrections, though, and Infinitely Polar Bear never drifts too far off track, even though its tone is as mercurial as Cam’s moods. Forbes’ tremendous affection for the characters—slightly fictionalized versions of herself, her younger sister, and her parents—is always apparent, and lends the film layers of warmth and humor that are very hard to resist.
Ruffalo’s showy performance as the unpredictable, bigger-than-life Cam is the blurb-bait here, and rightfully so. But Saldana’s character is really the emotional center of the story, and easily the most complex. Maggie often hovers at the edges of the plot, leaving us to wonder why she makes the choices she makes, and what she really intends to do once she’s completed the Columbia program. Whether her decision to leave the kids in Cam’s care was one of faith, naiveté, or sheer desperation is never clear. I would like to have gotten to know her better.
Infinitely Polar Bear is equally light on insight when it comes to Cam’s condition, but it’s clear that Forbes didn’t set out to make any sort of hard-hitting examination of mental illness and its fallout. Rather, it’s a story about forgiveness and love, and a very fond remembrance of Forbes’ rocky childhood and her now-deceased father. The movie does have a tendency to gloss over the darker aspects of bipolar disorder and the devastation it can cause sufferers and their families. But that’s not so much a fault as simply the kind of story Forbes wanted to tell—something to remind us that people in general, and children in particular, are remarkably strong and resilient, and that sometimes things work out pretty well in spite of fate’s best efforts to screw it up. As unlikely as it seems, Infinitely Polar Bear really is an entertaining, feel-good movie about kids growing up in the shadow of mental illness, alcoholism, and poverty.
Perhaps hindsight is a little more myopic than the saying tells us, and maybe that’s a good thing. υ
Infinitely Polar Bear is playing at Regal Downtown West Cinema 8.
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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