Infinitely Polar Bear

In Boston at the end of the seventies, Cam Stuart comes out of hospital after two bipolar episodes. His wife Maggie goes to New York to study business at Columbia so she can find work, and leaves their two daughters with him for eighteen months. Cam loves his girls and is entirely unreliable about getting up, cooking and getting on with the neighbours. The film is not interested in the illness. It is interested in children moving into the caring role: the girls learn to manage their father, feel ashamed, get angry and still do not leave him. The film makes Cam neither a hero nor a victim; it looks through the older daughter's eyes. The form is small: a cluttered flat, apartment corridors, the walk to school and the colours of the seventies. The camera stays at a child's height. Maya Forbes wrote and directed. The film rests on her own childhood; her father had bipolar disorder and her mother likewise left for another city to work. The director's daughter Imogene Wolodarsky plays her mother as a girl. It screened in competition at Sundance on 18 January 2014. Mark Ruffalo plays Cam and Zoe Saldana plays Maggie. Who it is for: viewers who like stories of illness told from inside a family. Who it is not for: anyone expecting hardness. The film handles its subject warmly, and some will feel the heavier sides of bipolar disorder have been softened.