Thoughts on Brigsby Bear

On Hulu this month, I was happy to see they added Brigsby Bear, this 2017 comedy that got very little theatrical release and seemed fairly obscure or under the radar, and I had heard of it but hadn’t seen it. It starred Kyle Mooney, and was a unique premise about a guy named James who got abducted as a baby and raised by a couple in an underground bunker, where he grew up watching a children’s TV show called Brigsby Bear, a fantasy show with a giant bear and wizards and magic, that was in reality created by his captors (Mark Hamill and Jane Addams) as a tool to control and manipulate him. He gets rescued, placed back with his biological family, and though he’s 25 now, he is still very childlike and obsessing with wanting to recreate Brigsby Bear for his own movie, essentially still being emotionally tied to the character because it was the only art connection he had to the world, no other media, and it always made him happy throughout his life.

I really liked this one a lot, it’s both weird and wholesome. Like Kimmy Schmidt, it straddles this line of being upbeat while treading over darker material, where the hero is an optimist who acts very childlike for their adult age, like how Kimmy would still act 14 as an adult because it was when she got abducted and her development was delayed. Similarly, I was unsure at James’ age, thinking he was in his late teens, and was surprised when they said he’s 25 (Mooney was in his thirties at the time). He mostly hangs out with teens, which is a little strange for him being an adult, but I could get that due to his immature development, he connected more with them than people his age. I did like his friendship with Spencer (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.), an Afro-Latino nerd into sci-fi and horror with AV interests who helps James get into filmmaking to create a Brigsby Bear movie in a lo-fi, homemade kind of way.

I did have issues with how, when he’s returned to his family, they don’t put him into counseling or do any kind of rehabilitative treatment for the trauma he’s going through, rather just assuming he’ll just fit right in with his family, who are strangers to him, forcing family togetherness with a list of “fun” things to do. They only bring in a therapist (Claire Danes) when he needs an intervention, like when he’s obsessed with Brigsby Bear and it leads him into trouble. For a movie that felt grounded in balancing PTSD trauma with a hopeful survivor, it did bother me how clueless his family was being in thinking he’d just snap right back into place as their son as if he was never stolen from them all his life.

I really liked Greg Kinnear in this, as the sympathetic detective who is in a weird place of wanting James to move on, but also wanting to help him where he’s at right now. Kinnear just played him with warmth and likability, and I enjoyed their connection together.

I did have questions as to why the couple abducted James for so long, beyond just wanting a child. The movie glosses over that, as the film is obviously about the survivor and not his captors, but the story doesn’t give a decent explanation for it, like holding him in an underground bunker for so long, though the fake TV show is explained as Hamill’s character had created a Teddy Ruxpin-like toy in the 1980s and had the toys and props for his own propaganda children’s show for his abductee. While it did skip over some of the more worse aspects just to keep the movie a light comedy about using art to follow your dreams and be creative, especially being inspired by childhood nostalgia, I did enjoy the movie, so I’m fine with that.