Movie Review: We Bought a Zoo

A scene from 'We Bought a Zoo'. Courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Let’s start this review off with some real talk, shall we? I very rarely get personal with my recommendations, but when thinking about how to approach this review of We Bought a Zoo, it seems unavoidable. This is the type of film that depends not so much on critical and analytical skills as it does the viewer’s personal preference.

I’ll put it to you all like this. Do you like films like Patch Adams or The Blind Side? You know, movies based on true stories that still manage to have absolutely no basis in any sort of reality and are designed solely to pluck at the heartstrings with a chainsaw like tenacity? Can you use “triumph of the human spirit” to describe the movie you just saw? Is Tom Shadyac one of your favourite directors? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, this review is completely useless to you. Just go buy a ticket. If you like being pandered to, and quite a few people do and I would never begrudge them that right, this movie will hit the right spot.

For everyone else, We Bought a Zoo will be a long and relatively unrewarding sit. Not only does director Cameron Crowe (Say Anything, Jerry Maguire) continue his almost decade long decline, but the story that makes its way to screens this Christmas is one of the most highly illogical and openly mawkish true stories in recent memory.

Matt Damon stars as depressed and disheartened journalist Benjamin Mee. The recently widowed father of two has just quit his job and wants to move away from the city life to greener acres. While searching for a new home, Mee happens upon a privately owned zoo up for sale that his young daughter (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) seems completely taken by (as evidenced by the 5 or 6 times her character openly exclaims “WE BOUGHT A ZOO!” in the movie) and his older son (Colin Ford) is cheesed off about because of the backwoods location of the new home means none of his fair-weather friends will come to visit him there.

Mee also has to contend with the well being of the animals and the on site staff, headed by zookeeper Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson). Kelly has doubts about Benjamin’s true financial commitment to the park, as does his disapproving new agey, banker brother Duncan (a near comatose Thomas Hayden Church). Benjamin realizes that to justify the cost of buying the zoo, he needs to get the park into operating condition with very little knowledge of his own on how to get the job done. Ben turns to the park’s main crew of misfits (Angus MacFayden’s constantly angry enclosure expert, Patrick Fugit’s sweet, kind, and nearly mute primate expert, and Elle Fanning’s, um, manic pixie abandoned restaurant owner) to get the job done.

There are so many unanswered questions within this set up that are impossible to overlook if one stops to even think about the story for one second. Why was the entire zoo on the open market with the animals included? If the property was up for sale, who was paying for the staff to be there to keep taking care of the animals? Wouldn’t a zoo in such a condition be sold to someone who could actually operate a zoo even if the first two questions were answered? Where did a journalist who just quit his job even find enough money to buy the zoo in the first place? (He does go through financial difficulties, but still…) The movie doesn’t care about any of these questions.

Aside from the slightly brain dead plot, Crowe’s direction leaves even less to be desired. Have your parents ever said they weren’t mad at you, but they were really disappointed? My thoughts on Crowe’s direction here almost mirror that. Crowe’s last film, Elizabethtown, was a spectacular miscalculation that was frustrating to watch in every conceivable way. It was maddening, but it was a film that only Cameron Crowe could have made. It was a uniquely personal failure. We Bought a Zoo, on the other hand, could have been made by anybody. It is such baseline, stereotypical tearjerker material that the mind boggles as to why Crowe even signed on in the first place. It’s so impersonal (aside from some very obvious and heavy handed nods to nostalgic tunes, because what would a Cameron Crowe film be without those) and so cold that the movie seems to be on autopilot.

Also to Crowe’s demerit is the fact that he doesn’t seem to have any clue how to direct small children. It slightly plagued some of his earlier works, but here it’s just insufferable how he has these kids act. I’m sure Jones and Ford are great child actors, and I know Fanning is capable of better, but more than the rest of the cast they get the short end of the stick. Jones is only allowed to be precocious to the point of tooth rotting and Jones is just there to be surly, petulant, and shouty all the time. And poor, poor Fanning. She is stuck playing Kirsten Dunst’s role from Elizabethtown as if that manic pixie dream girl was on speed and fifteen years younger, making Fanning’s character here easily the creepiest person to show up on screen this year.

The only credit this film can really be given is to the two leads. Damon is simply incapable of being awful in a film. He’s such a good actor that one could easily buy into what his character is feeling when the story around him is a complete mess. Johansson fares even better in a role that has next to no character development or definition. She’s such a good sport that she becomes the only person on screen worth giving the hug to that this movie is so desperately looking for. If there were an award for best performance in a bad movie, she would win hands down.

I’ve gone on far too long, and I could go on even longer. I haven’t even mentioned the villainous USDA inspector who acts like the villain in Moulin Rouge or how transplanting the story from its native England to Southern California makes no sense, but I shall leave it at this final example from the film to sum things up:

At one point before the family leaves the city, the youngest child complains to her father that a party going on next door is too noisy for her to sleep. She creeps downstairs in her pyjamas and curls up to her father to say that the neighbour’s “happy is too loud.” That brief quote sums up the film quite nicely. This is a film that wants to be loved so badly that it might stop just short of outright assault to make it happen. Films like this have always existed and always irked people, but this is a project that truly does seem beneath everyone involved.

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