Do we raise our kids? Or do they raise us?
There’s some of both going on in “Infinitely Polar Bear,” a semi-autobiographical tale of kids growing up in the shadow of their father’s mental illness.
Kenosha native Mark Ruffalo plays the bipolar husband of long suffering Zoe Saldana. We meet them long after his impulsive and eccentric qualities blossomed into a mental illness that intrudes on their lives and that of their two daughters.
But after receiving treatment and being prescribed Lithium he becomes their sole caregiver, when their mother moves from Boston to New York to attend business school.
Ruffalo’s character – based on the father of writer director Maya Forbes – is from old money, but is cash poor, living on an allowance in a rent controlled apartment cluttered with junk and driving his daughters to school in various battered cars, one with no floor.
He embarrasses them publicly and disappoints them privately. But he is never really dangerous and when not irrational has a pied piper quality that Forbes turns into pure childhood nostalgia.
We see him chain-smoking, swearing and sipping a beer while using a sewing machine to make a costume that his younger daughter – played by Forbe’s real life daughter – needs for school. And we see their adventures as a family and with friends he forces them to make, in scratchy home movie montage.
Ruffalo, fresh off “The Avengers: Age of Ultron,” is an indie actor at heart usually in films where – like the Hulk – he veers between sensitive and rage filled. Here he balances the manic highs with the affection and humor of a man anchored to reality, but sometimes overwhelmed, by his family.
Forbes’ tale is bittersweet, but even at its worst it stays in hopeful territory. If being a good parent means your kids escape childhood alive, then Forbes’ father qualifies. Her film is living proof.
*** Three stars
With Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Keir Dullea, Imogene Wolodarsky, Wallace Wolodarsky, Ashley Auferheide. Produced by Sam Bishee, Bingo Gubelman, Benji Kohn, Galt Niederhoffer, Wallace Wolodarsky. Written and directed by Maya Forbes. Rated R; language. Approximate running time: 90 minutes.
Tags: Avengers, Infinitely Polar Bear, Ruffalo, Zaldana Posted by