Film review: We Bought A Zoo (PG)

CAMERON Crowe’s new film is like the duck-billed platypus in the way it defies categorisation. Is this a water-loving, weepy drama about grieving adults, or a perky beast of a generic comedy with kids and animals?

It’s certainly nothing like the original book by Guardian journalist Benjamin Mee, who came home from the south of France to open a Dartmoor zoo with his son, daughter and dying wife.

Arguably, Mee’s version has been well chronicled, since it also became a BBC 2 series called Ben’s Zoo, tracking his struggle to wrangle depressed ostriches and wolves at the door in darkest Devon, but Crowe’s film has moved the pieces around quite a bit.

Benjamin is now the wholesomely American Matt Damon, whose wife died six months before the opening credits, leaving him to single-handedly cope with a moody teenage son (Colin Ford), who draws morbid pictures in art class, and a bright-as-a-button seven-year-old daughter (Maggie Elizabeth Jones). Meanwhile, Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson) and her gang of eccentric keepers, have each been allocated one distinguishing feature, except for Angus Macfadyen, who is Scottish, bearded, angry and boozy.

It turns out they haven’t bought a zoo, more a therapy centre stocked with potential replacement wives for Benjamin and a girlfriend for Dylan, in the perky patient shape of Elle Fanning who is supposed to be Johansson’s cousin. Other distractions include runaway bears, a race against time and funds to get the zoo certified fit and running for the tourist season, and a sickly old tiger who Benjamin refuses to have put down because he’s too attached to what amounts to be a clanging parallel to cling to the past.

Along the way, we learn that Crowe has never met a montage he didn’t like: there are montages of feeding animals, writing cheques, grieving for dead wives, and mending fences (another clang).

Providing a running commentary is a dad-rock soundtrack which strikes up Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going To Rain when a storm is brewing, and punches out Tom Petty’s Don’t Come Around Here No More when Dylan gets booted from school.

It’s not all bad. The film is fortunate to have Matt Damon, who is far more relaxed and natural in his interactions with his screen kids than George Clooney in The Descendants, and who goes some way to persuading us that Ben is worth rooting for. But this doesn’t stop you wondering how Cameron Crowe has lost his mojo.

Once upon a time he was a scriptwriting wunderkind, specialising in smart characters armed with good third act speeches. But this facility seems to have deserted him after Almost Famous, and in the decade since, he has generated two flops (Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown) and a couple of fanboy rockumentaries. We Bought A Zoo puts him at an even greater distance from his old form. Instead of his genial emotional truth-telling, we have trite implausibility; it’s a movie caged by its own lack of complexity and ambition. At one point Damon’s sceptical brother (Thomas Haden Church) counsels him to “travel the stages of grief – but stop before zebras get involved”.

Too late: we’re already thinking turkey. «

On general release from Friday