Redeeming creatures

We Bought a Zoo — in which a family buys a zoo — does what it says on the tin and if you like this sort of film you will like this and if you don’t you won’t, and you have to ask yourself why you buy The Spectator every week? It’s for analysis like this which, I think you will find, is unavailable elsewhere. But do I like this sort of film? Actually, I rather do. There are no surprises. It is comfortingly straight up and down. It is heartwarming, to the extent you can buy it. There are animals: lions, tigers, a grizzly bear, and a funny little monkey. I found it a perfectly agreeable way to spend the two hours I would otherwise waste and you may feel similarly if this is the sort of film you like, but probably not if you don’t.

Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) directs this true story about a single father, Benjamin Mee, who decides he and his two children need a fresh start so purchases a rundown zoo, as you do. Mee’s real-life memoir is actually set in Dartmoor, but this transposes the action to California, which is fair enough, and probably sunnier, if less of a granite upland dating from the Carboniferous period of geological history capped with granite hilltops known as ‘tors’.   When the film opens, Mee (Matt Damon) is struggling to hold together his family and his LA journalism job after the death of his wife, Katherine. (Thankfully, at least he doesn’t also have to brace himself for tors this time out.) He has a 14-year-old boy, Dylan (Colin Ford), and a seven-year-old girl, Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), and has yet to get a grip.