We Bought a Zoo

Cameron Crowe and co-writer Aline Brosh McKenna moved Benjamin Mee’s memoir from England to California. The real place is Dartmoor Zoological Park in Devon, the real family British. The biggest change is chronological. In life Mee’s wife Katherine died after the family bought the zoo and moved in; the film reverses that, putting the purchase after her death, so grief becomes the reason for the project rather than something lived inside it. The animal that got out in reality was a jaguar named Sovereign, not a grizzly. The park on screen never existed. Rosemoor was built as an eight acre set at Greenfield Ranch in Thousand Oaks; enclosures, walkways, observation tower and amphitheatre were all built for the shoot. Jónsi of Sigur Rós wrote the music. Crowe recruited Matt Damon by arriving on the True Grit set with the script, a compilation of songs he burned himself and a copy of Local Hero. The decisions turn on a licence inspection more than on the animals; the repair list of over a hundred thousand dollars from inspector Walter Ferris runs the clock. A good fit if you accept an open argument about whether to put an ailing tiger down inside a family film. Not for viewers who know the memoir’s real sequence and cannot accept the film’s chain of cause.