SCREEN SAVOR
The Not-So-Great Depression BY
GREGG SHAPIRO
Infinitely Polar Bear Cast
(Courtesy of huffingtonpost.com)
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nfinitely Polar Bear (Sony Pictures Classics) marks the directorial debut of the film’s writer/director Maya C. Forbes and it feels like a first movie. A deeply autobiographical project, the film also stars Forbes’ daughter Imogene Wolodarsky as Amelia, the character based on Forbes herself. Beginning in 1967, around the time Cam (Mark Ruffalo) and Maggie (Zoe Saldana), the parents of Amelia (Wolodarsky) and Faith (Ashley Aufderheide), met while working at the Boston-based PBS affiliate WGBH, Infinitely Polar Bear follows the fractured family of four through a multitude of struggles. Bipolar Cam has lived his life under the unpredictable spell of his manicdepressive episodes. In 1978, after Cam lost another job, Maggie attempts to leave him and take the girls with her. However, following his hospitalization and settlement into a halfway house, Maggie has a slight change of heart. Realizing Cam will never be able to properly provide for them (in spite of coming from a moneyed blueblood family whose relative’s portrait hangs in the Museum of Fine
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Art), Maggie applies to and gets into an MBA program in New York. And here is the setup. With Maggie away at school working on her degree, Cam moved into the apartment with his daughters and does as much as he is able to give them a somewhat normal life. Bouts of depression, excessive drinking and chain-smoking combined with reckless driving, slovenly housekeeping, irresponsible parenting, awkward social interaction and so on, become the daily routine of the girls’ childhood. The story has as many, if not more, highs and lows than Cam. Should a movie about a manic depressive be as manic and depressing as its subject? Forbes seems to think so. Infinitely Polar Bear, whose title comes from Faith’s mangling of her father’s condition is not Ruffalo’s best work (see The Normal Heart or The Kids Are All Right for that). The young actresses hold their own in their scenes, while Saldana is the one who comes out the best. Not the worst first film ever, but one that raises doubts about what might come next. theguymag
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