Based on a true story, Benjamin Mee is a recently-widowed father who moves his family to a beautiful estate miles outside the city. The only catch is that the estate is also a dilapidated zoo replete with 200 animals, and the purchase of the home is conditional on the new owner keeping the zoo and its entire staff. The Mee family subsequently sets out to rebuild and refurbish the zoo to its former glory, making new friends along the way. - skip ad - Genres: Adaptation and Drama Release Date: December 23rd, 2011 (wide) MPAA Rating: PG for language and some thematic elements. Distributor: 20th Century Fox Distribution Cast And Credits Starring: Matt Damon, Colin Ford, Thomas Haden Church, Scarlett Johansson, Patrick Fugit Directed by: Cameron Crowe Produced by: Julie Yorn, Cameron Crowe, Rick Yorn

Cameron Crowe may be the last of the Hollywood romantics. He’s best known for his stories about love and longing, for films that immortalize the moment when characters bare their hearts, as when John Cusack serenades a girl with a boom box in “Say Anything” and Renée Zellweger tells Tom Cruise he had her at hello in “Jerry Maguire.” These are images of such excruciating sincerity that they invite, almost demand cynicism. Yet it’s their openness that makes them work. And while his films depend on the familiar image of the couple in love, these are relationships that exist within a larger tribe, a band, a family and now, with “We Bought a Zoo,” a menagerie.



What Mr. Crowe’s films also share is his delicate touch with actors. Ms. Zellweger has never been better than in “Jerry Maguire,” which found both Mr. Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. at their most appealing. Matt Damon, the star of “We Bought a Zoo,” is a stronger actor than those with whom Mr. Crowe often works, and the combination might initially seem off. Mr. Crowe leans toward lightness while Mr. Damon, who can do glib as well as the next star, likes to roam around in the shadows, so that even his comedies carry a sting (as with “The Informant!”). But this seriousness, which complicates his boyishness with pathos, gives ballast to a movie that might have drifted along on charm.

When “We Bought a Zoo” opens, his character, Benjamin Mee, is struggling to hold on to his family and his Los Angeles journalism career after the recent death of his wife, Katherine (Stephanie Szostak). Benjamin has yet to get a grip on being a single parent to 14-year-old Dylan (Colin Ford) and 7-year-old Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones, a natural), but he seems strangely at ease, whether he’s fumbling with school lunches or warding off predatory moms bearing trays of condolence lasagna. He’s so self-assured that when his editor doesn’t respond to his story pitches, Benjamin just up and quits with a smile.

The confidence with which Benjamin breezes out the door (in a job-shedding profession like journalism, no less) immediately signals that you’re not in Kansas anymore, or anywhere resembling the real world. He rationalizes that it’s for the good of his children, who are the same two reasons most people would cling to their jobs.

In classic movie logic, he doesn’t agonize about how he’ll keep his children housed, fed and clothed; he doesn’t even scramble for new work. Instead, he sells their home and buys a picturesquely dilapidated house with mountain views that not only comes with a lion, tigers and bears, but also a lovely zookeeper, Kelly Foster (an appealing Scarlett Johansson). The zoo, to judge by the shy glances, is more of an ark.

There are complications, though this being a Cameron Crowe movie they’re soon worked out. The zoo, having fallen into disrepair, has been closed and is being kept going by the sheer good will of employees like Kelly. Benjamin starts writing checks and, with the help of the staff (the cast includes Patrick Fugit and Angus Macfadyen), the zoo squeaks and roars back into shape. The enclosures are repaired and expanded, the bills and employees paid. Little Rosie takes to her new home swimmingly even as Dylan sulks and stomps about, initially unreceptive to Kelly’s attentive cousin, Lily (Elle Fanning). Benjamin, meanwhile, continues to keep it together, his facade of confidence occasionally dinged by a bit of slapstick, child trouble and some palpably anguished nights.

“We Bought a Zoo” is based on a nonfiction book of the same title that chronicles how the British journalist Benjamin Mee together with his family bought a closed zoo that they rehabilitated, renamed and reopened in 2007. Mr. Mee’s mother, Amelia, was in on the family’s grand adventure as was Mr. Mee’s wife, Katherine, who died shortly after. In the movie, the brutality of illness and death remains safely off-screen when it comes to people and animals alike. Instead, Mr. Crowe makes the escalating tension between Benjamin and Dylan the story’s soft center â€" a miscalculation. Dylan’s petulance registers as generically adolescent rather than anguished, and his company wears thin, partly because Benjamin’s doesn’t.

The creaks, groans and clichés of the screenplay, which was written by Aline Brosh McKenna (“27 Dresses”) and reworked by Mr. Crowe are, however, finally outstripped by the attractiveness of the performers, those with two legs and more, and especially by the tenderness that Mr. Damon brings to his role. Mr. Crowe doesn’t linger over Benjamin’s despondency.

Rather, he gives it gentle due in passages that remind you that there’s often a strain of melancholia in this director’s work, a sadness that suggests that Mr. Crowe intimately knows the darkness and uses his movies as a way to resist (or deny) it. Whatever the case, you may not buy his happy endings, but it’s a seductive ideal when all of God’s creatures, great and small, buxom and blond, exist in such harmony.