What kind of small watering hole in a rural zoo in a family film has a one-sheet poster for The Third Man on its wall? The kind in a Cameron Crowe movie, that’s what.
There are no cinephile characters in the film, no justification for the poster’s being there, no subtle connection between this pleasant commercial product and Carol Reed’s masterpiece.
Nevertheless, I was happy to see this infinitesimal art-direction quirk. Crowe likes to throw cultural bones to his audience for no apparent reason – remember Todd Louiso’s jazz-obsessed nanny in Jerry Maguire? Likewise, he could have picked any generic film composer to create a score of manipulative music for We Bought a Zoo; instead he picked Jonsi, the dream-evoking frontman of ambient sensations Sigur Rós, to develop the film’s lovely and atmospheric compositions.
Furthermore, Crowe proves unafraid to subtitle one of his scenes, to depict a father-son quarrel with startling verisimilitude, or to float a reference no tyke will understand: When his daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) has buried herself under a mountain of stuffed animals on her bed, her father Benjamin (Matt Damon) quips: “I can’t even find you; you’re like a Chilean miner.”
It’s a genuinely funny and hip line, and there are enough moments like this in We Bought a Zoo to compensate for its lesser moments of unfettered emotionalism, cardboard characterizations and implausible twists. Damon’s Benjamin is an investigate reporter specializing in thrill-seeking adventure narratives, but his life is in flux. His wife died six months earlier – it’s the second film in a row, after Contagion, that Damon plays a grieving widow – and he’s about to quit his job at a foundering newspaper (you can hear the faint echo of Jerry Maguire’s dramatic, story-inciting exit from his employer).
Ripe for a fresh start, he hires a realtor (Curb Your Enthusiasm player J.B. Smoove, in a funny cameo) to show him some properties, only to fall in love with the house with the most “complications:” It’s on the site of a once-successful zoo, full of hundreds of live animals, all of whom desperately need a new owner with deep pockets to save them from being put down. Benjamin, who has spent his career covering other people’s adventures, finally has an opportunity to live his own, despite the attitude of his son Dylan (Colin Ford), a brooding-artist cliché with whom he has been unable to bond.
Benjamin’s family is assisted by what can only be described, without irony, as a ragtag band of lovable eccentrics who work on the zoo ground. They include the impossibly hot, impossibly single 28-year-old zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson) – a self-professed shut-in who lives with her mother and devotes every free second to the animals – as well as Patrick Fugit’s monkey-carrying maintenance man and Angus Macfadyen’s short-fused daredevil.
Crowe’s scripts ooze precious gestures and lofty platitudes, and We Bought a Zoo is no exception. The screenplay, based on a true story and co-written with Aline Brosh McKenna, becomes little more than a succession of calamities and resolutions, some of them conjured out of thin air. There is never a sense that the lives and work of these damaged but well-intentioned people will end in disappointment; you can tell that from the poster alone. And there is really no excuse for John Michael Higgins’ one-note villain, a zoo inspector who apparently finds perverse glee in seeing businesses die.
But I walked out of the film in a mood that can best be described as stupidly happy. I wasn’t ready – at least not yet – to break down the movie’s weaknesses, preferring to revel in the director’s well-honed craftsmanship. He takes great care in the way the sunlight illuminates Damon’s tortured face as the twinkly refrains of Jonsi ascend on the soundtrack. His films, and We Bought a Zoo especially, are the bubbles at the top of a champagne glass, imbued with an effervescence that sparkles and goes down easy.
WE BOUGHT A ZOO. Director: Cameron Crowe; Cast: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth Jones, Angus Macfadyen, Elle Fanning, Patrick Fugit, John Michael Higgins; Distributor: Fox; Rated: PG; Release date: Friday at most commercial cinemas