Mark Ruffalo is still appearing in quirky films despite being an "Avengers" superstar.
Watching Infinitely Polar Bear, I kept thinking of comedian Paul Gilmartin’s excellent podcast The Mental Illness Happy Hour. Gilmartin and his guests mine profound truths about life with depression, anxiety and other disorders, their own and those of family members. The show is sobering but also funny, and that’s the balance director and screenwriter Maya Forbes successfully strikes with Infinitely Polar Bear, which is based on her 1970s childhood in Cambridge, Mass.
The entertaining, moving film centers on Cam (Mark Ruffalo), a public television lighting designer who belongs to a prominent Boston family, the kind of people whose ancestors had their portraits painted by John Singer Sargent. Cam has bipolar disorder, and in opening scenes we see him in the midst of a manic episode. He has just been fired from his job, but he and his two young daughters, Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky) and Faith (Ashley Aufderheide), seem to be having a lot of fun as they run around in the woods near their house in the country. The episode turns frightening, though, and his wife, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), locks herself and the girls in the family car for safety. There is a lot of screaming in this scene, and in many subsequent scenes.
Cam goes to a mental hospital and then a halfway house, and Maggie and the girls move to a small apartment in Cambridge. They descend into genteel poverty, which begins to look like just plain poverty. Cam’s blue-blood ties are no help, because money is a fraught topic in his family, and the first rule seems to be: Never ask for money. Maggie devises a plan. She will study business at Columbia University in New York City, and Cam will move into the Cambridge apartment and take care of the girls. Most of the film deals with the 18 months that follow, during which Cam proves only marginally competent at looking after a family. There are triumphs, as when Cam sews a funky flamenco costume for Faith’s school project. And there are disasters, as when Cam leaves the children sleeping, late at night, so he can get hammered at a bar.
Forbes handles Cam’s mental illness compassionately, but some developments not related to it made me think: First World problems. Among them are the plight that makes Maggie weep: Once she finishes her Ivy League MBA, she will face challenges at her job in Wall Street finance. True, as a woman of color in the 1970s, she faces especially daunting challenges.
As you’d expect, much of what happens is seen from the children’s perspective. (Wolodarsky is Forbes’ daughter.) That has a lot to do with the tone Forbes establishes, which is more sentimental and lightly comedic than I might expect given how dire some of the events are. The biggest laughs owe to Ruffalo, who is quite marvelous as this troubled man. I’m glad he’s still appearing in quirky, intimate films like this one, even as the Avengers movies have made him a superstar.