In general, the movies have a pretty spotty record for
portraying mental illness; for every nuanced take like “Two Days, One Night,”
there’s a “Silver Linings Playbook,” treating its characters’
emotional disorders as an obstacle that can be overcome if they’re just plucky
enough. Falling somewhere in the middle is writer-director Maya Forbes’
semi-autobiographical drama, “Infinitely Polar Bear,” based on her childhood
growing up in 1970’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a bipolar father.
Mark Ruffalo plays Cam, a diagnosed
manic-depressive faced for the first time with being the chief caregiver for
his two daughters when their mother, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), leaves home to
pursue an 18-month MBA program at Columbia University in the hopes of finding a
better job to provide for their family. Maggie visits as many weekends as she
can, but the distance requires that Cam raise Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky) and Faith (Ashley Aufderheide)
alone for the most part — a formidable task considering the unpredictability of
his illness.
In her directing debut, Forbes aims for charming
slice-of-life dramedy over crafting a serious probe into the nature of
manic-depressive behavior (the “polar bear” of the title comes from
Faith’s confusion over the term “bipolar”), and as such, the film occasionally
threatens to become one of those movies arguing that suffering from mental
illness is really just a case of being a misunderstood free-spirit. But the
performances make up for the script’s occasional shortcomings; Ruffalo never makes the mistake of only playing the
illness, and he turns Cam into a real person. In contrasting Cam’s childlike
enthusiasm with his sometimes frightening tantrums, we feel both his daughters’
love and exasperation in dealing with their father’s constant highs and lows.
Saldana is equally good, capturing the internal struggle of a woman putting all
her trust in the man she married, hoping that he can find the strength to
control his nature for the sake of their family.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2015.
