We Bought A Zoo was Cameron Crowe's first film in six years. His previous movie, Elizabethtown, was well-intentioned but nigh on unwatchable. To say that his adaptation of Benajmin Mee's biography is an improvement would be to damn it with the faintest of praise.
While the real Benjamin is a beaming but balding gentleman writer, the movie Mee is a shaggy-haired Matt Damon. A journalist with an adoring wife and two charming children, Benjamin's enviable life is thrown up in the air when his partner develops cancer and dies. Unsure how to progress, our hero winds up buying a run-down zoo. And together with his kids, his brother (Sideways' Thomas Haden Church) and a comely young keeper called Kelly (Scarlett Johansson), he somehow finds the strength to recover, survive and later thrive.
Hollywood being Hollywood, the events in Crowe's movie don't unfurl in quite the order they did in reality - Mee had already bought the zoo before losing his wife.
If what we experience isn't actually what happened, the story we're told seems incredibly relevant in today's difficult times - when there seems to be even less hope than cash, carrying on can appear daunting indeed. And while We Bought A Zoo is undeniably sentimental, at least it's schmaltzy about things that are worth being sentimental about.
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