We Bought a Zoo, Dir. Cameron Crowe

We Bought a Zoo

Director: Cameron Crowe

Starring: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson.

The most stunning part of We Bought a Zoo, for me anyway, was that I genuinely liked Matt Damon in it. To clarify, I am not a Damon fan; I like him in Good Will Hunting, Dogma and Green Zone the rest of his filmography sets my teeth on edge. We Bought a Zoo made me like him 100% more, so it’s already pretty awe-inspiring.

In all seriousness though, it was fantastic. Sentimental and sweet with plenty of humour (there’s a Chilean miner joke that will come entirely out of left field, if it doesn’t surprise the laughter out of you, you’re dead inside).

Obviously it has its problem and it has a lot of the faults you can find in other Crowe works – the happy ending is a shade too easy, the obstacles are overcome in a simplistic manner in a timely fashion, fairly life-changing decisions are made with little to no regard for how they’ll feed themselves or not wind up homeless and frankly the son is a little jerk. I’d punch him in the face – but he did upset Elle Fanning so I think that’s fair. But who cares? Like I said, it’s sweet and funny and has a happy-ending, how can you hate the film equivalent of Christmas?

One of the films strong points was its characters; it was full of odd, yet compelling characters with Damon’s Benjamin as the heart at the centre (I was actually more enamoured by Rosie, the daughter, but that was as an extension of Damon anyway). The bizarre employees of the zoo in question, including a drunk, enraged genius played by Angus McFadyen and a massively underused Patrick Fugit – who was seen at all times with a monkey, as in many of his earlier roles he was constantly seen with a skateboard, are the reason Damon and the kids manage to take over management of a zoo when they have literally no zoological knowledge or basic animal experience. Then there’s Scarlett Johansson who, aside from being stunning, is pretty unremarkable. She’s a strong female character, which is nice and she calls people out when they’re being dicks (mostly the son) but she’s pretty basic. The important relationships are Damon and his son, Dylan, as the conflict, Damon and his brother as the odd-ball advice and frequent comedic relief and Damon and an elderly lion named Spar which is just so sad but lovely at the same time. Dylan’s obnoxious and kind of a dick but his mom just died and his friend’s don’t really care about him so it’s sort of understandable and it’d be boring if there wasn’t someone yelling at each other. There’s also Elle Fanning but her character was sort of disturbing and sandwich-obsessed, but I love Elle Fanning so that’s fine. And the little girl who played Rosie was genuinely more adorable than Jonathan Lipnicki in Jerry Maguire.

The script is witty and kind of goofy with very little clunky exposition, although Damon does massively overuse the word ‘man’ throughout. It’s probably about twenty minutes too long and there are a couple of unnecessary scenes but it’s fine because the scenes you could arguably cut are still sweet and enjoyable to watch. There are a lot of golden tinted filters on the shots and it’s all quite shiny but there was similar lighting used in Jerry Maguire and I’ve always thought it was a better film for it.

Sometimes a little bit of over-sentimental, schmaltz is exactly what you need and this film pretty much bulls-eyed the spot for me. 8/10

Oh, and the line “We bought a zoo” Is used three times. My friend counted.