Damon.

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.Deeply despondent after his wife dies suddenly of cancer, leaving his family behind to chase around the globe on dangerous and controversial assignments loses its appeal. So he chucks the job, the frequent flyer miles and the pity from well-meaning, energy-sapping friends, uproots his kids from school and, to the shock of everyone around him, takes a plunge into ice water and invests his inheritance in a piece of rural real estate miles away from everything familiar to start all over again. Even his own brother Duncan, played by Thomas Haden Church, thinks he’s turned into a nut job. Duncan, it seems, once ran away from society and spent some time in Bali trying to find himself. What he found was that like in the song, he missed people who need people. Undeterred, Ben tackles the job of renovating a zoo to meet government inspection standards in time for a grand reopening. The task takes it toll, in more ways than one.

Managing a lost cause that comes with a lot of sick animals and a loyal, unpaid staff of four led by a tough zookeeper named Kelly (a surprising turn by a deglamorized Scarlett Johansson) becomes a money-draining full-time responsibility that costs Ben every penny of his life savings. His teenage son, Dylan (Colin Ford), still mourning the loss of his mom, sinks into a pit of resentment, while his 7-year-old daughter, Rosie (perky Maggie Elizabeth Jones), jumps up and down with glee, jubilantly shouting, “We bought a zoo!” The stipulation in the purchase agreement was that the new owner must restore the zoo to its original state and make it fully operational. There isn’t much conflict, but we eventually meet and fall for 50 endangered species of animals that need to be rescued, from a shipment of runaway snakes to a moody, 650-pound grizzly named Buster who sometimes needs Paxil for depression. Along the way, you learn a lot of things. Bengal tigers have to be separated because they don’t get along. You never use the word “cages” (they’re politely called “enclosures”). Dylan thinks he’s in hell. Rosie loves everything, including the rats collected to feed the snakes. Just when Ben finally runs out of money, a trust fund the wife left in her will allows them to open with everyone chipping in—including Dylan, who draws the logo for the new zoo.

The ups and downs of survival while hanging on by their fingernails are too linear for spontaneity and the happy ending is nothing short of contrived, but the performances are sincere and Mr. Damon actually seems to be having a ball, giving one of the best and most mature performances of his career. The relationship between Ben, still hiding from the pain of loss, and Kelly, a 28-year-old animal lover with no personal life, wisely avoids the Hollywood clichés that too often furnish easy solutions for loneliness, while Dylan sees fate in a restorative way when he discovers romance with Kelly’s cousin (Elle Fanning, who, like her sister Dakota, is growing from child actor to leading lady with sex appeal faster than a flying bullet). The roles are mere outlines for meatier characters, but Mr. Damon brings a depth of humanity to the zealous but underwritten zoo owner that is guaranteed to inspire confidence. We Bought a Zoo has more soul than substance, but I’ll be darned if it didn’t put a smile on my face and keep it there. In a furrowed brow of a Yuletide season filled with movies so dark and ugly you can’t watch them without wincing, I see nothing wrong with feel-good movies like War Horse and We Bought a Zoo. Like the notes to studio executives scrawled on lobby cards by eager sneak-preview audiences back in the day, I say “Give us more like this one!”

rreed@observer.com

WE BOUGHT A ZOO

Running Time 124 minutes

Written by Aline Brosh McKenna and Cameron Crowe

Directed by Cameron Crowe

Starring Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson and Thomas Haden Church

3/4

Tuesday: Frank TV
If you're a baseball fan, or if you've just happened to flip past TBS in the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen an ad for Frank TV. To call the marketing push for the second season of Frank Caliendo's sketch show "ubiquitous" would be an insult to the word. These ads are everywhere. Did we mention the show is terrible? Whoever said impression is the lowest form of comedy must have seen a Frank TV marathon. Still, you should see it for yourself. [TBS, 11 p.m.]

Wednesday: To Catch a Thief
We can't fault you for thinking that To Catch a Thief occurred in Alfred Hitchcock's disappointing post-Psycho years. Surprisingly though, he actually made this light-as-air genre flick in 1955, long before North by Northwest, Vertigo and Psycho. That's fine. There are worse things than watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly circle each other like mountain cats against the backdrop of the French Riviera. Ms. Kelly, in her last appearance in a Hitchcock film, is so stunning here that you may need to avert your eyes. With all due respect to January Jones, a.k.a. Betty Draper … we've seen Grace Kelly, and you, Miss, are not even close. [HBO Signature, 6:35 a.m.]

Thursday: Touch of Evil
As an actor, Orson Welles was always much better at playing an angry cad than he ever was at playing a spry leading man. It goes to reason, then, that Touch of Evil is his best performance. He's bloated, drunk, racist, angry and truly corrupt. And every time he's onscreen, Touch of Evil reaches incredible heights. This is the reedited version of the classic, cut together by Apocalypse Now editor Walter Murch to hew more closely to Mr. Welles' original vision of the film, which Universal foolishly trashed and pushed to the side on the original release. (Watch the film's famous opening shot above.) [TCM, 10:45 p.m.]

Friday: Vanilla Sky
If the reports on the Internets are to be believed, the next Cameron Crowe movie involves Ben Stiller, Reese Witherspoon and the plot of Joe vs. the Volcano. Sigh. What happened? Vanilla Sky certainly has its flaws, but we'd posit that it might be the last great movie Mr. Crowe ever directs. It's an assured and melancholy work, and the ending never fails to make us incredibly depressed. Not sold? What if we told you Penelope Cruz is totally topless in this thing. Many, many times … (Ladies, don't kid yourselves. You want to look, too.) [Universal HD, 10:30 p.m.]

Mr. Crowe thus knows more about the rock-band era than I care to learn, and Almost Famous is thereby very knowledgeable about its subject. The predominantly young audience at the screening I attended seemed very enthusiastic about the film, which surprised me a little, if only because I thought rock was out and rap was in-but what do I know? Trapped as I am in the Jerome Kern time warp, I haven't really followed the charts since the Beatles, which leaves me lacking in an important dimension of many of the new films, and may explain why the narrative and dramatic elements are almost invariably so weak in contemporary mainstream movies.

Almost Famous is a case in point, as it keeps going up one hill and down another plot-wise until it settles for a cute, painless giggle of an ending. Oddly, Mr. Crowe has done much better in the past with such delicious romantic comedies as Say Anything (1989), Singles (1992) and Jerry Maguire (1996). The problem here is partly bad chemistry and partly relentless facetiousness.

Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) is a widowed college professor with two children, Anita (Zooey Deschanel) and William (played as a child by Noah Taylor and then as a teenager by Patrick Fugit). The laughs start early from the yahoos in the audience because Elaine has this thing about rock stars taking drugs and influencing kids-especially her kids-to do the same. Don't get me wrong: I believe that the "war on drugs" is a bigger joke than Prohibition ever was, but I still can't laugh at Elaine's antics, despite Ms. McDormand's farcical skills. What I object to is Mr. Crowe playing it both ways by keeping his undersized hero William free of drugs when he grows up. Even acid is treated as a joke, but of course no one gets killed from an overdose.

A few years pass and Anita is leaving home to become an airline stewardess, largely because she can't bear Elaine's lectures about drugs and rock music. (More laughs.) But already Ms. McDormand's character is showing signs of softness and pathos. Deep underneath, Elaine isn't all that bad. For example, she's not a bit like Kathleen Turner's rigidly repressive mother in The Virgin Suicides . Ms. McDormand's Elaine wouldn't drive anyone to suicide, least of all her own children.

At a very early age, William becomes entranced by all the rock folklore and finds a mentor in the cynically charismatic rock critic Lester Bangs (the seemingly ubiquitous Philip Seymour Hoffman). Lester warns William against getting too involved with rock people. They will give him all kinds of perks and freebies, but they're just using him to get favorable publicity. Nonetheless, William does become involved with a band named Stillwater and a girl with the groupie name Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). Indeed, it takes the whole picture-and many questionings from William-before Penny reveals that her name is actually Lady Goodman. Penny insists that she and her girlfriends are not groupies, but platonic "band-aids." In between the first meeting of Penny and William and the climactic revelation of her real name (the gift of her social-climbing mother), there are several betrayals, deceptions, attacks of whimsy and a failed suicide attempt. Yet nothing registers very deeply, simply because Penny and William never click on any level. She is always kidding him with a smile that says "I am just kidding," and he is forced to summon one of his two facial expressions, coupled with a perpetual silence that is never cool.

Penny's real love is Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), Stillwater's star guitarist, whom William is desperately seeking to interview in the midst of his affair with Penny. As a journalist, William is more obsessed with the musicians than with their music. The band keeps making loud, unkempt entrances, eliciting near riots from their fans, playing a few bars-and then there's a cut to the next offstage mob scene. The drug-and-sex orgies are similarly truncated, perhaps for the sake of a PG rating. The language is almost entirely free of four-letter words. Consequently, there is never any feeling of rawness or cutting loose. A violently contentious scene in an airplane that seems about to crash in a bumpy electrical storm lacks suspense to the point that it plays like a contrivance from beginning to end.

To break the single-note stridency of much of the action, there are frequent calls to and from William's mother, who manages to intimidate the wildest reveler with her words of wisdom. The one time we see Elaine teaching her college class, she is dressed grotesquely in some Eastern European Gypsy mode of unknown provenance (and for no specified occasion). When she blurts out to her students that she can't concentrate on her lecture because her son has been kidnapped by rock stars, there are more laughs from the audience. God, how I hate it when people are guffawing and I am sitting there with a grim expression on my face.

Mr. Crudup, Mr. Hoffman and, I suppose when all is said and done, Ms. McDormand give the best performances, yet in the ads for this film all the emphasis is on Mr. Fugit and Ms. Hudson-as it should be, perhaps, in terms of the narrative. Everything flows into them, and very little flows out. One reviewer described Mr. Crowe's view of his characters as "affectionate," which I imagine applies to Mr. Crowe's feeling for the entire rock scene. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with the musical selections and the score as a whole. Even with my tin ear, I could pick up some of the musical and emotional frenzy of the period. Yet none of the non-musical components on the screen matched the excitement of the music.

For whatever reason, too much of the dark side has been left out. Mr. Crowe was not obliged to revisit Altamont, but there was something faux in the depravity of the young extras Mr. Crowe and his associates have recruited to provide atmosphere. They reminded me too much of the kids in the audience, who were too young to remember the 60's and 70's but are persuaded by Mr. Crowe that they "get" the period just the same.

Kurosawa's Last Film Is His Gentlest

Akira Kurosawa's Madadayo , from a screenplay by Kurosawa (1910-1998) and based on the book by Hyakken Uchida, is perhaps the gentlest film in Kurosawa's 60-year movie career, but not indisputably the most sentimental. Ikiru (1952) is a strong contender for that distinction. As you may recall from your wet handkerchiefs of that era, Ikiru told the story of an old, terminally ill government functionary and his stubborn insistence on getting a children's playground built as his legacy, despite the indifference and opposition of the higher-ups who resist his project during his lifetime and then rush in to take credit for it after it becomes politically popular. The ever-polemical critics of Cahiers du Cinema deplored Kurosawa's cheap-shot irony on this occasion as a means of resolving the debate over who was a better filmmaker-Kurosawa or his countryman Kenji Mizoguchi-in Mizoguchi's favor; but in New York we all sobbed at screenings of Ikiru with a clear conscience, inasmuch as we were traditionally susceptible to sentimentality with even a smidgen of social consciousness.

In this respect, Madadayo is no Ikiru . Whereas the protagonist in Ikiru faced death as a medicinal certainty, the protagonist in Madadayo faces death as a metaphysical whimsicality as he tries to live out his earthly existence with as much dignity as possible. The structure of Madadayo is about an elderly professor who feels free in his old age to acknowledge the foibles and fears that make him like a child once more.

When Professor Uchida (Tatsuo Matsumura) announces his retirement to his students, they assure him that they, like their parents, will never forget his pedagogical excellence as a professor of German-and the funny thing is, they don't. When the aged professor loses his home to American bombers in 1943, they find another dwelling for him and his wife (Kyôko Kagawa) and help him move in. They throw a banquet for him on the occasion of his 80th birthday, and later on his 90th. He virtually apologizes on both occasions for living so long, but he is simply not ready to go.

The movie itself is not willing to end, and one might call it boring if one were not fascinated by some of the historical details around the edges, and by the empathy of the aged teacher. A great deal of the film is devoted to the professor's heartbreaking loss of his orange male alley cat named Nora. When a black alley cat turns up at his door, the professor and his wife adapt to their loss by adopting the new intruder. This is a movie you either relax with in a spirit of Zen fatalism, or reject outright as formless and unexciting. As an aging professor myself, I found myself victim to Kurosawa's rhythm of relentless inevitability.

Cameron Crowe spent many hours talking with Billy Wilder. Mr. Crowe, writer and director of Singles and Jerry Maguire , met with his 93-year-old interlocutor at his office, came by his house, dined with Mr. Wilder and his wife, Audrey. Like François Truffaut, whose famous book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock inspired the Q.&A. format of Conversations With Wilder , Mr. Crowe was the very model of filial piety and persistence. But all this eagerly solicited conversation was not enough to bridge the chasm–intellectual and generational, if not metaphysical–between the two men.

One of the great directors of the Hollywood studio system, Mr. Wilder is an Austrian-Jewish immigrant whose sensibility was shaped by the ironical culture of Vienna and Berlin. He is a sophisticated collector of modern art and a scathing observer of American life. Mr. Crowe is a native Southern Californian, a former reporter for Rolling Stone who now directs blandly engaging Hollywood films larded with the American optimism that Mr. Wilder ridiculed throughout his career.

Mr. Crowe's questions are frequently inane or obvious, but I suspect he only played the dope in order to elicit Mr. Wilder's amusingly irritated rejoinders. I was reminded of Mr. Wilder's 1948 farce, A Foreign Affair , in which Jean Arthur, playing a naïvely sermonizing member of Congress from Kansas on a visit to war-ruined Berlin, gets a taste of reality when she encounters Marlene Dietrich in the role of a ravaged cabaret singer:

"Mr. Crowe (Jean Arthur to Mr. Wilder's Dietrich) asks how he was 'able to resist the temptation for schmaltz':

"B.W.: For what?

"C.C.: For schmaltz. Throughout your career.

"Wilder offers a rare smile, as if I've just told a dirty joke. Have I misused the word?"

Mr. Wilder doesn't respond directly to the question, because he was never thus tempted. The conventional wisdom is that he was a cynic. In fact, he was simply tough-minded. In Hollywood, genuine cynicism tends to wear the friendly mask of effusive sincerity–of schmaltz. A fine recent example of this masquerade is Mr. Crowe's Jerry Maguire , a Wilder-inspired Clinton-era parable in which a humiliated sports agent gets his groove back by getting in touch with his feelings and overcoming his "cynical, cynical world." In Jerry Maguire , there's nothing wrong with the system that a more sensitive "corporate culture" can't fix.

The zing in Mr. Wilder's best work derives, by contrast, from his depiction of a world where–as Shirley MacLaine explains to Jack Lemmon in The Apartment –you have the grim choice of being a "taker" or getting taken. Throughout the 40's and 50's, in romantic comedies, film noir, dramas, adventure films, war movies, biopics and farces, the writer-director skewered the pieties of postwar America. (The only genre he didn't try was the western–a stretch for most urban Jews, alas.) His protagonists were rogues, pushovers, murderers; the endings of his films were seldom happy in the conventional sense. He beat the studio system mainly by sticking to his guns. After the first screening of Sunset Boulevard , Mr. Wilder's film about a desiccated Hollywood star and her precociously burnt-out paramour, Louis B. Mayer said, "How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?" The young man in question overheard the remark, and sank his teeth in further: "Mr. Mayer, I am Mr. Wilder, and go fuck yourself."

If rudeness is a sign of health, then Mr. Wilder may be counted a robust nonagenarian. When Mr. Crowe called to ask whether he'd make a cameo appearance in Jerry Maguire , Mr. Wilder hung up. The young director rushed over to his office on Brighton Way to plead with him in person, taking along his leading man, Tom Cruise, for good measure. They were both shown to the door, where Mr. Wilder took the occasion to dress down his admirer. "'Nice to meet you, and nice to meet you,' he said in a courtly fashion. His gazed passed across me and stopped on Tom Cruise. 'Especially you.'" Mr. Crowe finally cajoled Mr. Wilder into doing a book–but the older man warned him, "The book is going to be like shit."

It's not, thanks in part to the stubborn Mr. Crowe but mostly to Mr. Wilder, who is a great talker: witty, cutting, perceptive. Listen to the way he handles Freud, whom he met as a young journalist in Vienna. The father of psychoanalysis kicked Mr. Wilder out of his apartment, but not before the young man caught a glimpse of the couch. "It was a very tiny little thing," he remembers. "All his theories were based on the analysis of very short people." Mr. Wilder was always good on such details. He says he began making films "because you live, actually you live 5, 10 or 15 or 20 different lives"–the filmmaker shares the reporter's restless search for vicarious experience.

The cunningly dopey Mr. Crowe asks if there's an afterlife. "I hope not," Mr. Wilder answers, "because there are so many shits that I've met in my life, I don't want to meet them again." Was he in love with Dietrich? "I was not. I do not fuck a star. That's a primary rule of mine … If I did have a real yen for that thing … then I fuck the stand-in." Is Audrey, his wife of the last 48 years, the love of his life? "She is kind of … 80 percent … What the other 20 percent is, I cannot tell you."

Born in 1906, Mr. Wilder arrived in Hollywood in 1934. (Three-quarters of his family, including his mother and grandmother, perished in concentration camps.) In 1939, he had his first hit, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka , which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, a patrician Republican. By the early 1940's, he was directing his own scripts and acquiring a privileged view of the workings of the studio system.

It's a pity that Mr. Crowe is a schmoozer rather than a critic. He's breathtakingly indiscriminate in his praise of Mr. Wilder's movies, which he calls "a treasure trove of flesh-and-blood individuals, all wonderfully alive" (a description that seems woefully inadequate when extended to William Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard , who narrates from the grave). In fact, Mr. Wilder is an ambiguous hero, part rebel, part conformist. He was a smasher of taboos and also a calculating crowd pleaser who increasingly pulled his punches when they threatened to graze the audience. Always more of a writer than a director, he created few lasting visual images: There is nothing in his repertoire to match the best work of his contemporaries John Ford and Orson Welles.

By the 1960's, with signs of intelligent new life in American cinema, Mr. Wilder's best work was behind him; his 50's irreverence seemed curiously tame in the face of a tumultuously changing American reality. When Mr. Crowe asks Mr. Wilder what the 60's were like for him, he replies, "I didn't even know they were the 60's." Pauline Kael wrote a vitriolic review in 1961 of Mr. Wilder's Cold War satire One, Two, Three : "Wilder hits the effects hard and sure; he's a clever, lively director whose work lacks feeling or passion or grace or beauty or elegance. His eye is on the dollar, or rather on success, on the entertainment values that bring in dollars." (Ironically, Ms. Kael's view that "vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery" precisely echoes Mr. Wilder's own convictions about filmmaking.) Around the same time, Dwight Macdonald wrote in The New Yorker that Mr. Wilder was "not cynical enough; he uses bitter chocolate for his icing, but underneath is the stale old cake."

I.A.L. Diamond, Mr. Wilder's writing partner from the late 50's through the early 80's, called Mr. Wilder's style "sweet and sour," a phrase that aptly describes the canon of Jewish comic films, from Mr. Wilder and the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen. I'm not sure whether Diamond was thinking of Chinese food, but it fits: At his worst, Billy Wilder gave us takeout–you left the theater titillated but oddly undernourished; at his best, in films like Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity , he laid out a full banquet, more sour than sweet.