There was a short piece in The New Yorker last year that made this one seem like a sureshot; it mentioned, among other things, that when Wes Anderson heard the story of writer/director Maya Forbes's childhood, he told her to forget about everything else and make this movie. Twenty years later, here it is. It's obviously a labor of love, and I'm a little reluctant to find fault with it. However...
I can see why Forbes cast Mark Ruffalo as her father, Cam, a Boston trust funder who'd been diagnosed as bipolar years before (that's where "polar bear" comes in). Cam was tantrum prone, moody and unstoppably eccentric (way past the standard movie "quirky"), but Forbes wants us to see the side of him that her mother fell in love with and his children were clearly devoted to. Ruffalo's an unselfconscious, immensely likable actor, and he's rarely let us down, but this time he doesn't seem to have much of a handle on his character.
He basically plays Cam as an amped-up version of his normal exuberant self, but he sometimes speaks in an affected stagy voice--unclear whether that was Cam doing bipolar shtick or Ruffalo trying out an accent. All in all, I really couldn't see him as the black sheep of a Boston Brahmin family, let alone a guy who'd be tempted to sing along with a bagpiper busking in Harvard Square. (Forbes got one of her cousins to play a partner in the family brokerage firm who talks with the authentic Back Bay honk; the city of Boston itself is played by Providence, RI, a little less convincingly.)
Forbes's daughter Imogene, OTOH, gives a great performance as her mother's 12-year-old self, but Forbes's mother, played by Zoe Saldana, comes across as oddly generic. Overall, there are some entertaining moments, but despite its powerful subject, "Polar Bear" didn't really engage our emotions; the script just seems like a series of disconnected episodes-to be fair, I guess that's the way that most of us who aren't Proust or Charles Schulz remember our childhoods-and the film doesn't pick up much momentum as it goes along. Long story short-watchable but disappointing.
I can see why Forbes cast Mark Ruffalo as her father, Cam, a Boston trust funder who'd been diagnosed as bipolar years before (that's where "polar bear" comes in). Cam was tantrum prone, moody and unstoppably eccentric (way past the standard movie "quirky"), but Forbes wants us to see the side of him that her mother fell in love with and his children were clearly devoted to. Ruffalo's an unselfconscious, immensely likable actor, and he's rarely let us down, but this time he doesn't seem to have much of a handle on his character.
He basically plays Cam as an amped-up version of his normal exuberant self, but he sometimes speaks in an affected stagy voice--unclear whether that was Cam doing bipolar shtick or Ruffalo trying out an accent. All in all, I really couldn't see him as the black sheep of a Boston Brahmin family, let alone a guy who'd be tempted to sing along with a bagpiper busking in Harvard Square. (Forbes got one of her cousins to play a partner in the family brokerage firm who talks with the authentic Back Bay honk; the city of Boston itself is played by Providence, RI, a little less convincingly.)
Forbes's daughter Imogene, OTOH, gives a great performance as her mother's 12-year-old self, but Forbes's mother, played by Zoe Saldana, comes across as oddly generic. Overall, there are some entertaining moments, but despite its powerful subject, "Polar Bear" didn't really engage our emotions; the script just seems like a series of disconnected episodes-to be fair, I guess that's the way that most of us who aren't Proust or Charles Schulz remember our childhoods-and the film doesn't pick up much momentum as it goes along. Long story short-watchable but disappointing.