Mark Ruffalo a father figure, flaws and all

Mark Ruffalo, always an engaging screen presence, has been enjoying a purple patch.

Champagne Piper-Heidsieck And Rooftop Films Present A Special Preview Of Ethan Hawke's New Documentary "Seymour:...

Mark Ruffalo, always an engaging screen presence, has been enjoying a purple patch. He scored Oscar nominations for The Kids are All Right in 2010 and Foxcatcher last year, when he also won awards for his lead role in the HBO television movie The Normal Heart, about AIDS in 1980s New York.

Purple is probably the only gaudy colour Ruffalo does not wear as manic-depressive dad Cam Stuart in Infinitely Polar Bear. He sports a lot of bright green and, in one memorable scene, a pair of red togs that would be the envy of Tony Abbott. So too, perhaps, would be the speech he delivers to his nervous family: “Men like to hunt and mate. That’s why we have balls!”

MORE: Alan Rickman’s chaos theory

This is the feature debut of television writer Maya Forbes and is based on her childhood experiences. Forbes was a driving force behind the biting 90s talk-show spoof The Larry Sanders Show, so there’s a lot of hard humour in this film, but it is leavened by warmth and compassion. We first see an over-the-top Cam in a college video from 1967, the year he was diagnosed as bipolar. His African-American girlfriend Maggie (Zoe Saldana) decides to marry him anyway, rationalising that “half the people they knew were bananas’’.

Fast-forward to 1978 and there is no room for frivolity: Maggie visits Cam, post the budgie-smuggler breakdown, with their two young daughters, Amelia and Faith, in tow. “We know Daddy is a good person,’’ Maggie tells them, “and we know he would never hurt us, but it’s hard for people to understand that.’’

Cam recovers and Maggie suggests a deal: she will go to New York to do a graduate degree; he will move back into their Boston apartment and look after the girls. It’s a plan that may just be crazy enough to work. Cam is a loving, attentive father, sometimes scarily so. He treats his pre-adolescent girls in a refreshingly adult way, and they are spirited, rounded characters, especially Amelia, played by Forbes’s daughter Imogene Wolodarsky.

It would be easy for a film about a bipolar dad to trace a predictable arc that would see him mess up but triumph in the end, his difference making the difference. This is not that film; it is more ordinary, and more believable and satisfying for it. Ruffalo delivers one of the perform­ances of his career, restrained and full of charm.

Restraint may not immediately come to mind when thinking about the court of Louis XIV of France but in a way it is integral to A Little Chaos, the second directorial outing for English actor Alan Rickman.

The Sun King (archly played by Rickman) is moving his palace from Paris to Versailles and as part of the renovations wants to create “gardens of exquisite and matchless beauty”.

“Heaven shall be here,’’ he decrees — but adds that it must be created within an earthly budget.

It’s such a huge job that the royal landscape architect, Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts), advertises for an assistant. Against the odds, the job goes to a woman, Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet), who is hired despite — or because? — of her radical view that garden design should resist restraint and order, should instead encourage a little chaos.

Sabine is a widow with a tragedy in her past (and Winslet is moving when this is revealed), while brooding Le Notre is unhappily married. It’s inevitable sparks will fly, but one of the disappointments of this film is the lack of on-screen chemistry between the two stars.

Indeed, the most passionate moment — even if it is one characterised by restraint — comes between Winslet and Rickman in a delightful scene where Sabine mistakes the king for a fellow gardener.

Aside from the potential romance between Le Notre and Sabine, the main drama lies in the construction of the gardens, with misogynistic rivals the villains of the piece.

Rickman’s directorial debut was Scottish drama The Winter Guest (1997), starring daughter and mother duo Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law (who has a role in this film). After such a hiatus, this seems an odd follow-up: a French period drama in which everyone speaks with English accents, so much so that the Belgian Schoenaerts sounds out of place.

Having said that, A Little Chaos, shot by American cinematographer Ellen Kuras, is easy on the eye: the settings and costumes are beautiful and the cast is appealing, with a camped-up Stanley Tucci providing the laughs as the Duke of Orleans. A passable film for a lazy Sunday morning.

Infinitely Polar Bear (M)

3 stars

National release

A Little Chaos (M)

2.5 stars

National release