REVIEW

We Bought a Zoo

— It is my unhappy duty to report that We Bought a Zoo does not represent a comeback for Cameron Crowe, a writer and director in whom some of us have much invested.

At his best - Say Anything ..., Almost Famous - Crowe is a director of great warmth who’s very smart about the way late baby boomers experience and remember their culture. But something happened about a decade ago, when he tried (and by most lights, failed) with the supremely ambitious Vanilla Sky, a problematic but underrated movie that was widely derided by critics and largely ignored by audiences. Then, in 2005, came the heartfelt flop Elizabethtown, which suffered serious tonal problems. Then silence.

But 2011 was looking like a good year for Crowe; he has already released a couple of viable rock ’n’ roll documentaries: The Union, about Elton John’s collaboration with his idol Leon Russell, and Pearl Jam Twenty. Earlier this year, We Bought a Zoo was turning up on lists of most anticipated films. I saw it heralded as a potential Oscar winner.

It’s not that.

At best, it’s a fairly safe movie to take the kids to, although after the recent exotic animal unpleasantness in Ohio there’s a faint queasiness factor. At worst, it’s the sort of slovenly assembled, paint-by-numbers time waster that doesn’t even seem able to hold the director’s attention. This is the sort of movie where a husky Matt Damon will put on a toque and heavy jacket to do some outdoor work. Another character will ask him why he’s wearing the funny hat. Damon will then tell that character it is because he is cold.

And the next shot - the very next shot - will be of a calendar that reveals the date is June 28. It is summertime.

And this movie is set in Southern California.

Granted, we don’t know exactly where in Southern California - but it doesn’t look like the particularly mountainous part of Southern California where it gets really cold in the summer. But then, I probably shouldn’t worry too much about this point - it’s obvious that none of the filmmakers did.

Oh, and this is the sort of movie where they cast Scarlett Johansson as a socially awkward zookeeper who can’t get a date (though she probably spends a lot to make sure her uniforms are perfectly tailored).

And ladies, if you’re dying, and you want to make sure that your none-too-responsible-with-money husband doesn’t go bankrupt and put your family on the street after you’re gone, what you ought to do is open a secret account and start tucking away money. But whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about this account. Instead, put all the statements in a safety deposit box, and hide the key away in your husband’s old grimy sweatshirt, the one you used to wear. Then, after you’re gone, and he has blown all the family’s savings on the zoo referred to in the title, he’ll find it and thank you for giving him a second chance at life. (And that horribly disfigured Scarlett Johansson.)

I give up.

Damon stars as a newspaper journalist who specializes in glamorous, dangerous stories - the sort who will ask a pontificating evil dictator about his favorite movie. But his wife has recently died, which makes him sad and his editor doesn’t like his idea for a new column, so he quits. (Huh? Precisely.) Even though he has a family to look after. (He’s also too honorable and proud to accept his editor’s offer to fire him, so he can get a severance package.)

He has two kids, a nice litte girl (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) and the adolescent Dylan (Colin Ford) who is like a less articulate version of the kid in We Need to Talk About Kevin. And then the kid from Almost Famous shows up with a monkey on his shoulder, and Bob Dylan and Neil Young sing on the soundtrack. And then mercifully it’s over and everybody is happy except for the American Humane Society, which wonders why they couldn’t have used all virtual animals like they did in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Because being in this movie isn’t going to help any of their careers any more than it will help the careers of Elle Fanning, Thomas Haden Church or J.B. Smoove.

I guess I should say that this movie is allegedly based on what has been called a charming memoir by British journalist Benjamin Mee, whose family bought the Dartmoor Zoological Park in England. I haven’t read that book, but I can’t imagine it has much in common with this inane and lazy movie.

We Bought a Zoo 76

Cast:

Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Elle Fanning, Colin Ford, Thomas Haden Church, John Michael Higgins

Director:

Cameron Crowe

Rating:

PG, for language and thematic elements

Running time:

124 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 12/23/2011

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