Review: We Bought a Zoo

After years wandering the metaphorical woods following 2005’s disappointing Elizabethtown (and the few years before that dealing perhaps with the fallout from 2001’s Vanilla Sky), director Cameron Crowe has returned with a film that is in both its nuts & bolts and in its blindingly optimistic spirit the essence of what made him, through the ‘80s and ‘90s, such a popular director.

We Bought a Zoo stars Matt Damon in full every-guy mode, playing Benjamin Mee, an adventure journalist who quits his job and uproots his two children following the death of his wife. His 14 year old son Dylan (Colin Ford) has been expelled from school, having handled his mother’s death by stealing and drawing progressively more disturbing (though quite good) portraits of decapitated screaming monsters.

Apropos of not much at all, the Mees find a shuttered, dilapidated zoo and decide to buy it – it being sold, of course, with the provision that the new owners of the huge property must become caretakers of the animals. Benjamin installs his family, and immediately begins sorting the place out with the help of a reluctant, skeptical zoo staff (led by Scarlett Johansson as the head zoo-keeper) who immediately peg him as a dilettante.
 

The great bulk of the film takes place in the few months before the Zoo’s theoretical and in-doubt (they need a stamp of approval from a USDA inspector played so archly by John Michael Higgins that he may well have been twirling the ends of an invisible moustache and plotting how he was going to tie up the whole Mee family and leave them on the railroad tracks). Mee must win over the zoo staff, he must repair his relationship with his son, his son must navigate the waters of his first relationship with the zoo’s youngest worker (Elle Fanning), and we get to watch the whole thing unfold in Crowe’s trademark unabashedly cheerful manner. We also get to watch a series of animal adventures – a depressed bear, a morose lion, a gurning capuchin – all of which Benjamin must work through, of course, while working through his grief for his dead wife and learning about life.

We Bought a Zoo is every inch a Cameron Crowe film. The wildly corn-ball romanticism of Say Anything and Jerry Maguire is back (and so is the hyper-cute, weirdly articulate child, this time in the form of Maggie Elizabeth Jones as Rosie Mee instead of Jerry Maguire’s Jonathan Lipnicki). So is the (oddly inappropriate) ‘90s grunge metal – scenes of fence building are overlaid with Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” (I’m not sure that enough people will have seen Crowe’s last film, this year’s doc Pearl Jam Twenty, to appreciate the sense of rocker-loss that Pearl Jam and Soundgarden poured into that song, alas).

Crowe as a director, as it turns out, after Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown isn’t going to become - this year at least – anything other than what he always has been. He’s very good at making movies that trot along the borderline between cute & just sad enough to be really happy and sickeningly cute & just sad enough to be really, sickeningly happy. His films are odd. They’re infinitely safe, full of animals and flannel rock and sad, hard-working moms and dads and cute as hell kids, but they inevitably end up alienating a few cheesed-out folk who aren’t super down with the blatant, showy emotion of them all. They’re adored and derided, cultural touchstones that millions of people love and other millions of people kind of, well, roll their eyes at. We Bought a Zoo isn’t a perfect film, by any means, but it’s a Cameron Crowe film, and whether, really, it’s perfectly charming or perfectly dreadful is going to be up to you and how strong your eye-rolling muscles are. I liked it, but mostly because of the bear.

Mike's the Editor here at thesubstream, mostly he does Film Lab stuff but occasionally he reviews movies and hosts our weekly WTI segment. For more on what's out this week, check out Mike's video reviews of Carnage and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Matt Brown's excellent review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.