Imogene Wolodarsk, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, and Ashley Aufderheide (Seacia Pavao/Sony Pictures Classics)
“He’s sitting on the ground wearing just a bathing suit. He must be freezing.” Little Amelia Stuart reminds mentally challenged moviegoers that it’s unusual for dad to wear swimming trunks while mom is wearing a heavy winter coat in Infinitely Polar Bear, a terrible feel-good movie.
Amelia is a fictitious name for writer-director Maya Forbes, whose film is based on her own life. In fact, Forbes casts her own daughter (with producer-husband Wallace Wolodarsky) as this fictional self. With snippets of Super 8 film grain and occasional attempts at working class authenticity, Infinitely Polar Bear is an indie movie in big studio clothing. It’s a family movie made by the very family it depicts. So why does it seem so false?
Cameron (Mark Ruffalo) is Amelia’s shivering, bipolar dad. His manic episodes are helpfully color coded; the red bathing suit indicated the kind of danger that makes the girls’ mother Maggie (Zoe Saldana) send her husband to an institution; in a later episode, his green polo shirt and shorts (“I look like a big green bug,” he says out loud, but what he’s really saying is, “Hey everybody, I look like hope!”) signifies, well, hope.
The film is based on the time the Harvard-educated director and her sister spent under the care of their bipolar father while their mother went to grad school. Forbes’ dramatization of her childhood is rife with cliches and insufferably self-congratulations, as when a female neighbor tells Cameron, “I think it’s so evolved! Most men would be completely emasculated by their wife going on to be the breadwinner.”
Ruffalo is a usually reliable actor, even if his gosh-shucks persona approaches schtick. But Forbes encourages him to lay on the affected accent of a Boston Brahmin whose family line is so filthy rich that John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of his “great grandpapa.” The actor is playing a different guy than he usually plays, and the results are completely unconvincing.
But the movie’s last straw is the fucking ukulele. If I had a mentally ill father and wanted to honor his memory with a self-serving semi-autobiographical film, the last thing I’d do would be to pander to audiences and patronize my father’s condition by accenting his dysfunctional but oh so adorable and heartwarming behavior with a fucking ukulele score. I don’t have anything intrinsically against the instrument, it’s fey timbre a crucial sonic element of the sound of the Magnetic Fields, whom I love. But it’s become soundtrack shorthand for fake authenticity.
The film’s coy title comes from younger daughter Faith (Ashley Aiufderheide), who calls dad’s behavior “totally polar bear,” unaware that her cute little phrase evokes vicious beasts known to maul little children to death. (Maybe that is what she means, but it’s still cloying).
Infinitely Polar Bear isn’t exactly a hagiography. Manic dad regularly cusses out his daughters, and if there is any verisimilitude to these scenes, the Forbes girls must have come out thoroughly damaged. But strum a few chords on a uke and awwww, this unstable delivery system for mixed messages is a Good Dad! And then this patronizing tale of mental illness wraps up its frayed plot with the girls’ triumph of, you guessed it: attending private school!
Curiously, the film treats this troubled father as a better fate than their accomplished mother. Or maybe not so curiously, since this corporate-sponsored passive aggression seems to convey the not-so-sublimated bitterness Forbes must have about her mother going off to school while they were left to fend for themselves with Crazy Dad.
Forbes worked as a writer/producer on The Larry Sanders Show, so she must have a knack for uncomfortable comedy, but the story is too close to home for this to seem like anything but a vanity project—one whose familial hostility is thinly veiled at best. I swear the animal drama Max, which seems to reek of jingoistic pabulum but strikes some unusual and true notes, rings truer than this slice of supposed human drama.
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Infinitely Polar Bear
Written and directed by Maya Forbes
With Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana
Rated R for language
90 minutes
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema, AMC Shirlington, Arclight Bethesda and Angelika Mosaic
