Although he’s got two music documentaries either in release or coming, Cameron Crowe hasn’t made a narrative feature film since 2005’s “Elizabethtown.” I remember the mixed reaction that film got at Toronto when I saw it there in its longer cut glory. But the chilly reception Crowe received then probably had little to do with the delay between his latest narrative project, “We Bought a Zoo,” and his last. After all, some 4 years passed between “Vanilla Sky” released in 2001 and “Elizabethtown.”
Below is the trailer for “We Bought a Zoo” Crowe’s adaptation along with Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”) of a book by Benjamin Mee. The remarkable story is based on Mee’s real life experiences in purchasing and reopening a wildlife preserve also referred to as a zoo. Mee’s wife, who had fought against cancer for some time prior to the family’s move to the zoo, passed away some months after taking over the property. This left Mee with his children to tend and operate the wildlife preserve. Below I’ve included a video interview with Mee, from BookLounge, in which he talks about the therapeutic benefits of owning a zoo. Certainly if Crowe’s movie was not inspired by a true story, no one would ever had believed it, and the film would have been compared to “Doctor Dolittle” and “Evan Almighty.” Frankly, such comparisons are inevitable.
From the trailer, you can see shades of “Jerry Maguire” as the character named after the writer Benjamin Mee and played by Matt Damon quits his job to purchase the zoo. From what I can glean, in the movie, Mee’s wife has passed prior to the purchase of the property and Mee’s character decides to radically move his family to move on with his life. It looks like Mee’s brother is played by Thomas Haden Church and a potential love interest is played by Scarlett Johansson. Ms. Johansson is still too young to play a mother of two, I suppose.
Crowe’s films are always a bit soapy but uniformly manage to wring out goofy tingly feelings that big tough guys probably only admit to their wives and girlfriends behind closed doors. And “Zoo” will probably have lots of introspective moments and incredibly cheesy but memorable lines of dialogue as its message is hammered home repeatedly. “You had me at the zoo!” “You complete me with the circle of life!” The cheap sentimentalist that I am at my core is looking forward to absorbing every single moment when it is released around Christmas this year.
