We Bought a Zoo Reviews (2011)

Cameron Crowe has talent that is as baffling as it is obvious. He has an eye for emotion that is often tender and real, but he punctuates that emotion with moments of awful, glaring falseness that make you wonder how the two impulses can live in the same person. His best film, Almost Famous, is a near-perfect examination of the extremely confusing life of an adolescent male, filled with scenes of emotional bittersweetness so tangible that it feels like one long, poignant heartbreak. His worst, Elizabethtown, is (to borrow a phrase from Achewood) the cinematic equivalent of the world’s worst song played on the ugliest guitar; it’s a gratingly insincere effort that feels as though it could’ve been a minor work of Zach Braff.

Most of his films fall somewhere in between those extremes, though, and We Bought A Zoo is no different. You could say that Crowe’s career has followed the contours of the life of a middle-class American male, examining the awkwardness and pain of adolescent love, twentysomething sex, the ups and downs of realizing at 30 that you will be working for the rest of your life, the death of a parent. Many of his films have involved families, and examine the strained and strange relationships therein, but We Bought A Zoo is perhaps his first film that really makes the notion of family its core.

That family here is the Mees, a name that makes for many a mishearing when watching the film. Bereft of purpose after the death of his wife, Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon), struggling with the responsibility of raising two children, one of whom has been expelled from school, has a Jerry Maguire-lite moment and quits his job as a newspaper journalist. While searching for something (anything) new, something that will take him away from his town with its hundreds of memories of his wife, he stumbles across a dream house in the country...to which is attached the titular zoo, fallen into disrepair after financial hardships. Despite the many, many thousands of dollars that he’s warned the upkeep of the zoo will cost him (and which he won’t have a chance of making back until the zoo can be brought up to code and reopened), he brashly (or desperately) decides that this is his moment to make the most of his chance at adventure, buys the place, and sets about re-establishing some sense of order to his life.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that this is the first fictional film that Crowe has directed which he’s shared a screenplay credit on. That screenplay was originally developed by Aline Brosh McKenna (better known for Morning Glory and The Devil Wears Prada), based on the memoir by the real-life Benjamin Mee, but when Crowe came aboard, he adapted it to his own purposes and now shares credit with McKenna for the script. There is a minor sense of division to the script, which is perhaps a result of two authors with different aims. Regardless, it is the source of most of the frustration which audiences are likely to feel toward the film, namely that it mostly consists of moving and funny relationships between the Mees and the put-upon zookeepers who are working unpaid to hold onto their dream, but also throws in a moments that reach so far for laughs (unsuccessfully) that they mostly scuttle the film's middle act.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first, though, because there is a lot of good to talk about here. The worst part of the film is a single character, a zoo regulation inspector named Walter Ferris (played gamely by John Michael Higgins), brought in for a surprise visit to the zoo, intending to give Mee notes on what precisely needs to be done to bring everything up to code before it can reopen. The problem here is that Ferris is essentially made out to be an arch supervillain, full of raised eyebrows and leering sexual harrassment: he wears an insanely expensive-looking outfit that seems intended to present him as an effete snob (and which seems wildly out of place in a zoo), he takes delight in exaggerating the smallest of problems out of what amounts to pure spite for someone he's never met, and reference is made to him having stolen innovations in exhibit design from the zoo’s enclosure specialist and shutting down the zoo he worked at previously. The problem is not Higgens’ performance; the problem is that the character is not even a character, it’s a caricature. When you are attempting to make a film about real people with real struggles, throwing in a exaggerated villain to placate the desire for conflict in your audience is a mistake, and it’s a shame that Crowe didn’t realize that. The character has his purpose in the drama, and it’s easy to see him delivering his verdict with a bit more humanity and sympathy; had he been a more real character, the film would be much better for it. A few other moments in the film feel similarly staged and awkward, but the Ferris character is the worst example of this tendency.

That’s a frustration, because the rest of the film is, if not on the level of Almost Famous, then at least a reflection of Crowe’s grasp of the intricacies of interpersonal emotion. Benjamin’s 14-year-old son, Dylan (Colin Ford), still struggles with the memory of his mother, and the gulf between the father and son seems almost insurmountable at times. His almost unbearably cute daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), is more levelheaded, but that might be both because she’s living in a zoo and is much younger than Dylan, and thus doesn’t have the same kind of intimate memories of her mother that he does. Complicating matters somewhat is the head zookeeper Kelly (a nicely de-glamorized, if still wildly pretty Scarlett Johansson), who forces Benjamin to struggle with the notion of letting go of his wife, six months dead, and moving on.

These stories are all very well-done, though some of them are given short shrift. That especially includes Dylan’s friendship/romance with Kelly’s cousin Lily (Elle Fanning, good as usual), an underaged employee of the zoo; Crowe has proven himself adept at the complexities of young love, but it seems like only a few minutes are allotted to the couple before their struggles come to a head, and a richer emotional payload could’ve been achieved had they been given more screen time. Johansson and Damon fare a bit better as people who recognize a mutual attraction but are unable to find a way past the ghost in the room that is Mee’s dead wife. Their performances are as unflashy as Higgens’ is over the top, and it works to their advantage, as they both come across as believably likeable and distant from their real-life personas as “Matt Damon” and “Scarlett Johansson.” Some actors are impossible to separate from their celebrity, but both work their way into their characters to a degree that makes their blossoming romance a joy to watch unfold.

And then there is the matter of those Crowe moments. Crowe has always been a director who can sum up all of his energy in a scene or three in each of his movies and deliver a sucker punch right to your heart: think the boombox scene in Say Anything or the run through the airport to say goodbye to Penny Lane in Almost Famous. While there doesn’t feel like there’s a single iconic moment here that’ll be lauded in Youtube mashups for years to come, there is at least a beat late in the film where Benjamin and Kelly look at each other across a field full of people. No words are exchanged, but the glances they share seem to sum up the struggles they've been through together and promise that a lot of joy is going to come their way in the future; it is smile-inducing in the extreme. Crowe manages to sustain a feeling of warmth throughout the film’s third act that is genuinely moving on a level that many films struggle to rise to. These are characters that you come to care for throughout the film, and you’re invested in their success; you want them to come to terms with their pain and live better lives. It is a cliché, of course, but at its best this is a film that I honestly didn't want to end.

God only knows what Crowe will move on to from here; he’s proven himself to be capable of films both sublime and terrible. We Bought A Zoo tends more towards the former, luckily. There is a sense of manipulation to the emotional journeys his characters take, but it is faint enough to be ignored if you let yourself do so. The finale feels perhaps a bit too easy to place this film among the best of the year, but if you have a heart, you are going to smile and cry when all is said and done. Probably at the same time.