Cameron Crowe has jumped the shark. We Bought a Zoo is a hyper-wholesome, corn-fed sapfest that’s one click shy of a TV movie.
The oft-blurted title is pretty much the premise. It sounds like it’ll be a kids’ film, or a brain-dead comedy — you know, the kind where mischievous raccoons keep intruding on slapstick dinner parties. It’s neither — and for once, that’s almost a shame.
Matt Damon‘s lost his wife (presumably to cancer) and, haunted by her memory, moves his kids out to a dilapidated zoo property. This comes equipped with a jeans-and-wellies ScarJo as well as a cast of quirky staff. Damon sets about turning the zoo around in time for grand opening, while his 7-year-old daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) makes adorable faces and his unsympathetic mope tween son (Colin Ford) stalks about with his best Nickelodeon pout sketching “dark” pictures. Some animals are pictured, and Best in Show‘s John Michael Higgins makes an appearance as a not-particularly-entertaining USDA inspector. Damon is watchable as always, and does a good job of it. Rosie is adorable, ScarJo is fine, and some of the animals are alright. But that’s about all there is to say that’s nice.
The problem with the film really isn’t the story, which is based on a book and presumably, in some form, actually occurred. (In England.) No — the issues are its polyanna-ish disregard for real-world concerns (like income!) and, chiefly, its shameless supersaturation with saccharine feel-good love stories. Damon and ScarJo trade chaste glances; Damon and his dead wife trade strangely overdone on-screen reminiscences; the brooding mope son fumbles with an impossibly sunny Elle Fanning (who was fabulous in Somewhere, but overdoes it here — I blame Crowe); and young Rosie has a love affair with every member of the audience. (She’s very cute.) It’s too much. Too much love. Too much feel-good. Everything’s too perfect. Too Disney. It’s also semi-religious, all sunbeams and tears and reverent choral soundtrack. There’s only so much theophany I can take in a movie about a goddamned bunch of neglected smelly animals.
I’m coming down hard on this because I’m not sure what the point of it all is, and Crowe frankly should know better. I thought this would be an upbeat and playful romp with some nudge-wink beast hijinks and maybe a little soul-searching. What it was instead was a cutesy story nugget lacquered into unrecognizability with layer upon layer of unrealistic interpersonal sap. What Michael Bay does to macho hero buddies, Crowe has now done to romantic pair-bonding. If I wanted that kind of party, I could have just seen New Years Eve.
HAUS VERDICT: We Bought a Zoo. Then we sanded down the edges, stripped all the hardship, and polished it up into a perfect little nugget of nobody-cares-anymore-what-you-did.
See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.
“There’s only so much theophany I can take in a movie about a goddamned bunch of neglected smelly animals.” I nominate this (already) as your Quote of 2012.