Cameron Crowe’s true story of a widower who buys a run-down zoo for his grieving children is warm, decently acted and twenty minutes too long. Matt Damon and Thomas Haden Church keep it honest; the music keeps telling us how to feel.
Cameron Crowe has taken a true story, an English widower who bought a failing zoo with his children, moved it to Southern California and made from it the film you would expect that sentence to produce. We Bought a Zoo is decent, warm and in no hurry to surprise anyone. Matt Damon and Thomas Haden Church keep it honest for two hours; the script and the music keep trying to make it sweeter than it needs to be. We came out fond of it and unable to recommend it without a list of conditions.
Damon is the reason it works as often as it does. He plays Benjamin Mee as a man who has been told he is coping and half believes it, brisk with the children and hopeless with his own grief, and he never once reaches for the tears the material keeps offering him. Church, as the brother who thinks the whole thing is madness, gets the best lines and says them as if they cost him nothing. Their scenes together are dry and quick, and they are the ones in which the film sounds like Crowe rather than like the genre.
The zoo itself is well made. Clay A. Griffith gives it peeling boards, a snack bar with the shutters down and enclosures that need a fence and a coat of paint, so that when the staff start working we can see what the work is. Rodrigo Prieto shoots it in late-afternoon light, dust in the air and animals half in shadow, and he lets a tiger fill a frame without cutting away to tell us it is impressive. Scarlett Johansson plays the head keeper in Deborah Lynn Scott’s khakis and boots with no make-up to speak of, and she is good at being tired and competent. The romance the film half-heartedly proposes for her is the least interesting thing she does.
There is one scene we will not forget. Benjamin and Dylan (Colin Ford) finally shout at each other in the kitchen, and what comes out is what neither has said since the funeral. Ford, who has spent an hour sulking in his room drawing things nobody wants to see, matches Damon line for line, and for two or three minutes we forgot we were being worked on and simply watched a father and a son. It moved us. Then Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) arrived with something adorable to say, Jónsi’s score came up under it, and we were back to being told how to feel.
That is the film’s problem. Jónsi’s music, chiming and high and hopeful, is lovely on its own and is used for nearly every scene that has any feeling in it, so we were never allowed to find the feeling first. Crowe’s script, written with Aline Brosh McKenna, solves every difficulty on schedule: a problem is introduced, somebody makes a speech about it, it goes away. John Michael Higgins plays the inspector, Walter Ferris, as a sneering, clipboard-carrying obstacle in a film that otherwise has no villains and does not need one. Mark Livolsi cuts the middle stretch as montage, repair, paint, feeding, more repair, and at 124 minutes the film has a good twenty minutes it could spare.
Against Crowe’s own films it is minor. Jerry Maguire (1996) and Almost Famous (2000) had people who wanted things badly and talked about them well; this has people who want a zoo to open and talk about grief the way films talk about grief. Patrick Fugit, the boy from Almost Famous, is here as a keeper with a monkey on his shoulder, which is a pleasant thing to see and also a measure of how far the ambition has come down. The animals, for a film with this title, are oddly incidental. The old tiger gets a subplot; the rest are scenery.
It carries a PG and it will do the job on a wet Sunday with children who like animals and adults who do not mind being told when to feel something. If that describes your sofa, you will have a nice enough time. If it does not, the good scenes are Damon and Church talking and Damon and Ford shouting, and there are about four of them.
