The term “sentiment” more often than not carries with it a certain negative connotation when applied to film. There’s this idea that a film having an overtly sensitive side is somehow always a bad thing. And a lot of the time it is – see the cloyingly manipulative Best Picture nominees The Help and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close as prime examples. However, as Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and now Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo just go to show, a hefty dose of sentiment isn’t always a bad thing.
Based on a true story and memoir, We Bought A Zoo centres on Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon), a recently widowed father who is struggling with raising alone his two kids Dylan (Colin Ford), age 14, and Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), age 7. One day he decides to make a fresh start for his family and buys a house in the countryside which, as it turns out, is actually a rundown zoo. Unsure at first, Benjamin soon warms to the idea and decides to help rebuild and reopen the zoo.
Cameron Crowe is best known for the likes of the overrated Jerry Maguire, brilliant Almost Famous and incredibly underrated Vanilla Sky. The three of those sort of encapsulate the different extremes Crowe can go to with his film-making and We Bought A Zoo definitely falls more into the Jerry Maguire camp. It’s sickly sweet sentimentality will put some people way off, as will its broad strokes about the loss of a loved one, the want to start afresh and the generally life affirming nature, all set to the music of Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi.
As a huge fan of Sigur Rós – and with all the respect in the world to Jónsi it sounds almost exactly the same – I appreciated the inclusion of the music very much, a style we don’t hear that often, at least as a full accompanying soundtrack. Admittedly Crowe does use the music as a tool, a cinematic weapon if you will, to pull at your heartstrings. It is predictable in the sense that everything is built towards sentiment and trying to get us to care about the characters with every breath it can muster. But to me that really doesn’t matter all that much when the characters, story and dialogue are all so likeable.
Damon is a very charming presence as ever, showing once again that he can go from genre to genre, from character to character and still be convincing and incredibly watchable. Benjamin Mee is a long way away from Jason Bourne, and on top of that showing his diversity as an actor, it also illustrates that he embodies the characters instead of you just seeing Matt Damon under a different character name every time.
The supporting cast is all very solid, from Thomas Haden Church as Benjamin’s cautious but caring brother Duncan and Scarlett Johansson as Kelly the head zookeeper (not exactly believable but it sort of works in context), to the two children. Maggie Elizabeth Jones is utterly adorable as Rosie (although she is one of those children that could only exist in a movie) and Colin Ford as Dylan is surprisingly good. A scene in which he and Damon have a heated argument is strikingly powerful.
The film is by no means perfect – some of the animals scenes are hit-and-miss in terms of the cutesy animal-loving thing it’s going for, and it does, by the end, waver under the weight of its predictability and clichés. There’s never really a sense of jeopardy that things aren’t going to work out in the end, even when the snooty zoo inspector comes-a-calling to threaten the reopening of the zoo there’s a sense that the film is just going through the motions before the inevitable triumph.
Having said that, in all its sentimental glory We Bought A Zoo is a well made, quite touching film featuring some solid performances of characters that are always amiable in the best sort of way. Neither the life-affirming, all encompassing emotional journey that I imagine was intended nor the mawkish disaster that you might have heard about it being. A welcome big hug of a movie.
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