We Bought a Zoo That Became an Animal Kingdom
There isn’t much to add to We Bought a Zoo, since the title says it all. Away from the screen for six years, director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) returns with this holiday-season sugarplum designed to please children of all ages in multiplexes of all sizes. Based on a book by Benjamin Mee, a British writer and former columnist for The Guardian whose family actually purchased a run-down zoo called Dartmoor Zoological Park and turned it into a 30-acre tourist attraction in Devon, England, that is still thriving, the movie (written by Mr. Crowe and Aline Brosh McKenna, who wrote The Devil Wears Prada) transported the setting to Southern California, but it lost none of its sense of fun and adventure in the trip across the pond. Animals are the same everywhere, and so are the people who love them.
Benjamin Mee is played by Matt Damon, a smart and gifted actor who brings an abundance of intelligence and heart to a role that is not much more than a pencil sketch on paper, fleshing out the role of a tired, confused, overworked and heartsick widower with two kids to raise (see George Clooney in The Descendants) who is fed up with the declining world of journalism. Read More
