Infinitely Polar Bear

I find movies like Infinitely Polar Bear to be highly problematic to review.

This is a movie that feels very specific, the product of processed pain. You can't help but be impressed by the courage of the storyteller, the writer and/or director (who in this case happens to be Maya Forbes), and her clear-eyed determination to say exactly how it was, or at least how it felt to her at the time. I get the feeling Forbes loves her father very much. And I would very much like to love her movie.

But I can't, because it doesn't really feel like a movie, at least not a whole one that coalesces around a particular idea or character. It does feel like a beautiful gesture, a sweet valentine to a damaged but still viable father. It's sweet and it's sad and if I had any kind of heart that ought to be enough, right?

I guess I'm jaded. The problem is with me. But Infinitely Polar Bear is finally only OK, a small-scale transcription of a year or so in the life of a busted-up little family in Cambridge, Mass., in the late 1970s.

Cam Stuart (Mark Ruffalo) is the scion of a blueblood Boston family who, we learn in a grainy Super 8-shot prologue, was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder in 1967, soon after he was expelled from Harvard. But in the '60s, a lot of people overcame their inhibitions in a lot of ways, and Cam's illness could be perceived as part of his roguish charm -- it wasn't enough to prevent his girlfriend Maggie (Zoe Saldana) from marrying him.

But a decade later, Cam has lost his public television job and is becoming increasingly erratic. He and Maggie are now parents to 10-year-old Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky) and 8-year-old Faith (Ashley Aufderheide). They live in a peculiarly precarious zone between deep poverty and immense privilege -- Cam's wealthy family pays for their rent-controlled apartment but little else. They visit the mansion of Cam's grandmother, where they are attended by staff, but ride in dilapidated sedans with rusted-out floors.

While Cam is ferociously unconventional, dismissive of the benefits of the solid education he was at least for a while treated to, Maggie is more pragmatic. She understands that her children deserve better than the shabby genteel milieu she and Cam are providing, and so she determines to better herself. When she's accepted into a MBA program in New York, she's determined to go -- even if it means leaving her daughters in the care of lovable if cracked Cam.

Things play out as you imagine they might, as Ruffalo -- in an impressive performance that has some folks talking about an Oscar nomination -- shows us the many faces of a complex and at times self-destructive man struggling to conform to the template of a good father while battling his own instincts. Cam treats his daughters as though they are adults, to the point where he'll slip out after dark for a few drinks, admonishing them not to open the door to rapists. (Cam also has disdain for security chains -- if anyone really wants to come in, he tells the girls, the delicate chain isn't going to stop them.)

While there's a real darkness in Cam, he's generally presented as a harmless teddy bear of a dad, a big kid who'd like nothing more than to spend the day larking about with his daughters and their friends. He's a proud, loudly unconventional sort who doesn't always seem cognizant of the advantages he has enjoyed -- even with no money in his pockets he seems like a tourist in the slums.

I have no doubt he conforms to the writer-director's image of her own father, and I suspect that most of the incidents in this anecdotal movie are traced precisely from life. Yet I'm not sure that there isn't something trivializing about how the movie treats its central character. Mostly it makes it seem as though having a bipolar dad can be a lot of fun.

Still, there are plenty of virtues to cite, including the unsentimental performances by the young actors who play the daughters. (Wolodarsky is Forbes' daughter.) At the very least, Infinitely Polar Bear might be called an impressive debut, a slice of life that indicates a sensitive and empathetic presence behind the camera. This might have been a movie Forbes had to make, but it's unlikely to be her best one.

MovieStyle on 07/31/2015