Cameron Crowe (2011)
This movie evidently wasn’t made with a British audience in mind. The grand opening of the Rosemoor Animal Park takes place on the seventh of July – ‘Let’s go for 7/7’, says the zoo’s new owner, Benjamin Mee, on whose memoir Cameron Crowe’s film is based. After that, 7/7 keeps being mentioned as a red letter day. The movie wasn’t made with a pedant like me in mind either. The precise date of the grand opening is Saturday 7 July 2010, a date which never happened – the film is repeatedly specific that this is the summer of 2010, when the seventh of July fell on a Wednesday. Although the weather’s terrible during the week leading up to the zoo’s opening (strictly speaking, a re-opening: it had fallen on hard times before Benjamin appeared), the sun shines on the righteous on the day itself. But opening time arrives with not a visitor in sight – Benjamin’s fourteen-year-old son Dylan realises ‘something’s wrong’. I was briefly hopeful that something would be the date but in fact a tree has blown down during the previous night’s storm, blocking the entrance to the animal park. The Mee family and the Rosemoor staff discover hundreds of people queued up behind the fallen tree, unable to advance or to think of using mobile phones to report the problem or to climb over the tree trunk – although they manage to do this easily enough once the Mees invite them to do so. The smiling public comes teeming into Rosemoor and the animal residents anthropomorphically join in the fun. The poster for the film on the Wikipedia page shows Benjamin Mee with his infant daughter Rosie on his back and the chief zookeeper, Kelly Foster, at his side. Benjamin is played by Matt Damon and Kelly by Scarlett Johansson. Like them, the little girl, Maggie Elizabeth Jones, has fair hair which is gilded by the sun in a clear blue sky. The poster reminds me of those pictures in Mormon handouts showing people and animals living together in a smiley earthly paradise.
In spite of that association, there are no animals on the poster, only people, and this turns out to be significant. I hadn’t expected the audience at the Odeon to be so full of children, some of them very young, but fair enough: this is a family film the title of which suggests that exotic wildlife may be the stars of the show. If parents take their kids to We Bought a Zoo expecting that they’re liable to be disappointed. The children in the audience at Richmond were well behaved but they must often have been bored. There are several episodes involving beautiful and/or sick and/or dangerous animals (the dangerous bits are mostly played for comedy) but the lion’s share of the film is devoted to the people in it – particularly Benjamin and Dylan (Colin Ford) and the problems they have with each other and coming to terms with the early death (you assume from cancer) of Katherine, a beloved wife and mother. The consequences of Katherine’s recent death – it occurred not long before the family moved home and into the zoo – are a perfectly reasonable premise for the story but Cameron Crowe is so determined to accentuate the positive that he pretty well neuters this difficult situation. The film begins with a voiceover – it’s the voice of an adolescent boy speaking of his father in a tone that conveys loving admiration. In other words, Crowe assures us from the start that, by the end, Benjamin and Dylan will be getting along fine. Amid the triumph of 7/7, Kelly Foster’s thirteen-year-old cousin Lily (Elle Fanning), who’s home-schooled and working at Rosemoor, asks Kelly if she prefers animals or people. They cryptically agree people are best. When you reduce human beings, as Cameron Crowe does here, to harmless eccentric pets, I prefer animals.
We Bought a Zoo may be based on a true story but it proceeds according to the feelgood formulae and imperatives of commercial cinema rather than life: (a) avoid unpleasantness; (b) maintain a regular supply of heartwarming moments. A problem, in the world of this film, is something not just to be solved but to be solved quickly – or even ignored. Benjamin develops a particular attachment to an elderly tiger called Spar. It’s clear to Kelly and the other Rosemoor staff that this noble creature is on his last legs and should be put out of his misery but Benjamin won’t allow it to happen. We’re not meant to see any cruelty in this – we’re meant only to connect Benjamin’s denial of terminal illness with the death of his wife. Kelly is infuriated by his attitude, they have a row, and she storms off – to share a pizza with Benjamin’s kids. Later the same evening, she and Benjamin are chatting as if nothing had happened, even though the question of what happens to Spar has still not been resolved. A very few moments in the film are more tough-minded. Talking with Rosie about Katherine, Benjamin says, ‘But you know mommy’s still near you, don’t you?’ His daughter nods her head surely; we see in Matt Damon’s eyes as he turns away that he doesn’t share the child’s belief. In another scene, Benjamin and Dylan have a proper argument, and Benjamin gets genuinely angry. Damon is very persuasive in this exchange. When the son says of the zoo, ‘It’s your dream – you can’t impose your dream on me’, the father yells back, ‘Yes, I can – I can because it’s a good dream!’ This hints at something interestingly obstinate in Benjamin’s character but the moment passes quickly. As usual with high-volume exchanges of home truths in Hollywood, the yelling is cathartic: the tensions between Benjamin and Dylan are immediately expelled.
The occasional moments of truthfulness expose the easy falsity of the rest of the screenplay, which Crowe wrote with Aline Brosh McKenna (best known for her adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada). Benjamin first saw Katherine through the window of a local coffee shop, a place he finds (like many others) too painful to go near since her death. In the film’s final scene, he returns there with Dylan and Rosie and re-enacts (embarrassingly) his original meeting with the children’s mother-to-be. He does it with such conviction that Katherine (Stephanie Szostak) materialises at the table she sat at all those years ago – and she materialises not only to Benjamin but to Dylan and Rosie too. The film’s last image is of her beautiful face smiling beatifically out of the screen: she really is still near the family. It’s hard to know what to make of this ending – or what it says about the prospect of Benjamin’s romance with Kelly developing as seemed likely when we last saw them together. (There’s not a hint, of course, that a relationship with a new woman might create new tensions with Dylan.) Cameron Crowe seems to think that if you’re excessively sentimental you somehow transcend sentimentality. He enjoyed deserved success with Jerry Maguire (1996) and Almost Famous (2000) but his instinct to see the best in people plays him false here. He and McKenna have written some decent dialogue but the words issue from the mouths of characters so preconceived as loveable that they’re weightless. Crowe prefers people to animals to the extent that he’s negligent of the particular setting of We Bought a Zoo. Although the closing legends tell us that the innovative approach to animal welfare used by the real Benjamin Mee’s Dartmoor wildlife park is internationally admired and imitated, you don’t get any sense of what this involves, beyond wanting the animals to have plenty of space to move around in.
The casting of Matt Damon as Benjamin is far from imaginative, although he gives, as you’d expect, an intelligent performance – he doesn’t overwork his warmth and slightly cumbersome charm. As Kelly, Scarlett Johansson is striking at first. She looks great but she gives Kelly a straightforwardness of gesture and movement that’s slightly masculine. Johansson is consistently effective as a temperamental complement to a more imposing co-star (Thora Birch in Ghost World, Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, and so on) but this is the first time I’d seen her start to create a distinct, individual character. It’s unfinished business, though; as the film goes on, she softens into something more familiar. Maggie Elizabeth Jones is naturally sparky as Rosie; Colin Ford, while physically believable as Matt Damon’s son, is relatively self-aware. This fifteen-year-old is already an experienced actor in cinema and television and his acting lacks freshness. Thomas Haden Church, though he lacks variety, is likeable as Benjamin’s exasperated accountant brother. Other actors in the smaller parts – playing characters that are one-dimensional – tend to overdo it: Angus MacFadyen as the emphatically Caledonian carpenter at the zoo is the best of this group. The overacting extends to Elle Fanning but she’s distinctive enough to hold your attention and gets across an intensity in Lily’s awkward enthusiasm for the morose Dylan. John Michael Higgins is a feared and loathed zoo inspector: even the film’s villain comes right in the end by approving a renewed operating licence for Rosemoor. According to Wikipedia, Local Hero was one of Crowe’s inspirations here and an important part of persuading Matt Damon to play Benjamin: Peter Riegert makes a brief appearance as Benjamin’s publisher. There is a variety of music on the soundtrack, much of it wet.
17 March 2012
