Infinitely Polar Bear movie review (2015)

This troubled soul wobbles into view atop a bicycle while wearing bright red undies, a matching headband and nothing else, even though it is winter. Spying distraught wife Maggie (the languid and lovely Zoe Saldana, who for once isn’t sporting a green or blue alien hue) and their two grade-school-age daughters, Amelia and Faith, as they are about to escape in a car, this wild-eyed mad man starts banging on the windshield and yanks out the distributor cap from under the hood. The episode ends with a deflated Cam sitting cross-legged on the ground, emotionally spent and shivering.

A prologue consisting of fuzzy Super 8 home-movie footage already has us expecting the worse as it reveals that Cam, the scion of a once-celebrated blue-blood New England clan, was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder in 1967. And that Maggie married him anyway, given that everyone was basically a some sort of mental case back in the ‘60s.

However, this extreme meltdown in 1978 lands Cam in a hospital, where such meds as Lithium have left him benign to the point of being comatose and barely able to light his endless chain of cigarettes. When his family visits, it is very sad affair—until one of the girls notices her father’s treatment-induced bloated belly and punches it on a dare. An arcane throwaway line in which he warns her that just such a blow caused Harry Houdini to die suggests there is more to this shaky Cam (and to “Infinitely Polar Bear,” a garbled play on bipolar) than meets the eye.

There is an intoxicating authenticity and welcome low-key humor to what happens during the rest of this episodic story that manages to gently touch upon societal shifts, the class system, corporate sexism and racial identity as it shows how even an emotionally damaged adult can still summon enough caring and devotion be an effective primary caretaker.

That’s not surprising since screenwriter and first-time feature director Maya Forbes based the events on her own childhood in Cambridge, Mass. She and younger sister China, a lead singer for the cocktail-lounge-inspired Pink Martini, were raised by their charismatic though often erratic father while their breadwinner mother went to New York for a year and a half to earn her MBA at Columbia in the hopes of raising her family’s standard of living.