One of the year's winners.
Infinitely Polar Bear
Grade: A
Director: Maya Forbes
Screenplay: Forbes (Monsters vs. Aliens)
Cast: Mark Ruffalo (Foxcatcher), Zoe Saldana (Avatar)
Rating: R
Runtime: 90 min.
by John DeSando
Cam (Mark Ruffalo) loves his two daughters and his estranged wife, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), in 1978. The only problem is that’s he’s bipolar and therefore an unreliable husband growing worse and an eccentric dad whose out-there actions threaten to unbalance pre-adolescent Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky) and Faith (Ashley Aufderhelde).
Not to say any of his family is the worse for his bizarre world; in fact Maggie relies on him to be with the girls when she goes from their home in Boston to her MBA scholarship at Columbia for 18 months. As could be expected, he teaches them how to be creative and self-sufficient and excellent communicators. The mess he lives in, his chain smoking, and his alcoholism serve as blocks to a normal life, not to mention strange but amusing behavior difficult for anyone to endure over the long haul.
Maggie married Cam, both of them from privileged families, in the ‘60’s when bipolar was almost indistinguishable from hyperactive or manic-depressive, and, hey, many were tripping out anyway, so how could you notice the bipolarity? The red bathing suit and bandanna in one scene, all he was wearing as he gamboled around his family inside the car, is enough of a red flag to signal his instability.
As Maggie studies away from her family and after graduation gets turned down by a Boston firm because she has children, new writer-director Maya Forbes reminds us how much things have changed over the decades since then: women now more easily gain jobs and assume at least co-bread winning roles in the family. Although the times were heady, the challenges of the young and poor were many.
Mark Ruffalo plays such a nuanced role here that I would energetically support this nomination for an Oscar. His many classy roles, notwithstanding his success with the mainstream Hulk in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012), have signaled him as a potential winner and certify him as one of the finest actors of his generation.
Infinitely Polar Bear is a winner for this year.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
