Our latest viewing, well outside the usual summer blockbuster fare, was Infinitely Polar Bear. This Sundance/Indie movie was written and directed by Maya Forbes, who also worked on Monsters and Aliens and The Rocker. I found myself in a quandary, having thought that the movie was well directed and excellently acted, but also not liking it very much, mainly because of the characters. The stars of the movie are Mark Ruffalo (Cameron) and Zoe Suldana (Maggie) and Imogene Wolodarsky and Ashley Alderheide (their young daughters).
It’s the late 70’s and Cameron is the offspring of a well connected and rich family in Boston. He’s a guy who devolved from a charismatic and mercurial hippie years before into a serious mani-depressive, complete with chemical habits. In 1978, he’s out of the hospital, after having spent some time as a near zombie due to over-medication. He has now been moved to lithium carbonate and is somewhat able to function in the world. Maggie is also a former part of his world, his ex-wife, who fell in love and married him when he was an impulsive hippie, but subsequently split from him as he became more dysfunctional. He wants to re-connect with her and their two energetic daughters. Maggie wants to go to grad school in the gnarly, scary New York of 1978 and thinks that a tiny apartment there would not be a good place for her daughters. The “obvious” solution to this (or at least it would be in a “feel good” movie) is for Cameron to take care of the kids while Maggie is in school; she will come home on weekends. Cameron has some very minimal support from his rich family and nothing else to do, so he sees this as a way to get back with Maggie. So…the kids move in and Maggie goes off to school.
Suffice to say, life with Cameron is a roller coaster. He’s not real good at sticking with his psych meds so he goes on marathon ups and downs. He might clean up and redecorate his entire apartment in a morning or he might stare at the walls for days. He loves his daughters, but his idea of parenthood is to get them all wound up or cuss at the top of his lungs at them and the world or god-only-knows what else. He begs his family for more money but they return icy indifference and disapproval. He correctly suspects that his patrician relatives disapprove of his mixed-race marriage and kids; he’s probably right; they have little interest. If you can get past all this drama, he’s a decent guy with good intentions, but he’s also like a big 5 year old with too much caffeine and sugar AND a driver’s license.
OK, you say, what did I NOT like? What I didn’t like and found not believable as a plot line, is that Maggie, who seems like a smart and good person, would EVER leave her daughters in the hands of this crazy, irresponsible guy. Cameron’s fossilized relatives are not far off when they remark, “is this about feminism?” Not only does she do it once for 18 months in grad school, but after that, this careerist woman, expecting bigotry in hide-bound Boston, wants to take a well paying job in New York that will leave her with not enough time for her daughters, so she does it again, even after being called by police and welfare officials about his behavior. She needs meds as much as he does. That very major plot element made the story not work very well for me; it’s hard to imagine her leaving her kids in that situation. A small gripe…about two years pass in the movie and the kids don’t grow. Elementary school kids grow and change on a monthly basis, these kids seem to have some sort of a growth hormone lock.
As for my ratings, it’s a solid 3, but not more. The acting by Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Suldana is excellent, rising way above what I have seen either of them do before. The kids were also excellent, full of cheerful energy, giving you some hope that their characters will rise above their parents’ dysfunction. Production was zero-FX minimal, but excellent for the story that is being filmed. Direction is spot-on, believable and seemingly real. Sound quality is nasty, but OK for a low budget movie that’s mainly dialog; no surround FX needed. My big reservation, as I said, is that I could not give credibility to the plot. It’s a seemingly realistic movie but not a realistic plot.
