We Bought a Zoo movie review & film summary (2011)
At the film's outset, Benjamin Mee is still in mourning after the death of his wife. He's raising their kids Dylan (Colin Ford), in his mid-teens, and Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), who is 7. Dylan is nabbed for shoplifting, and Benjamin, a journalist, decides it's time to leave the big city and raise them in the country. He finds an ideal house, which the real-estate agent only gradually explains comes with its own menagerie. The place was once a private zoo, shut down for reasons involving money and regulations, and Kelly Foster (Johansson) minds the animals with the help of Peter (Angus Macfadyen), a pipe-puffing Scotsman, and Kelly's teen niece, Lily (Elle Fanning), who seems not entirely unaware she's in a script that may require her to sooner or later kiss Dylan.
Benjamin's brother, Duncan (Thomas Haden Church), is an accountant who urgently advises Ben not to buy a zoo. Well, that's the function of a good accountant. How many times has my own accountant entreated me, "Roger, whatever you do, don't buy a zoo!"
Kelly is a great-looking woman (after all, she looks like Scarlett Johansson), but she's all business, dedicated to the welfare of the animals. She can see that Benjamin has a lot to learn. One of their first differences involves Spar, an old Bengal tiger who is in deep depression. (So would we all be, if we had to live alone for 16 years in an efficiency apartment.) Should Spar be put down? Kelly and Ben have an emotional debate.
The villain is Walter Ferris (John Michael Higgins), an anal-retentive animal control officer who enforces strict standards involving the care and housing of the animals. Walter is a nit-picker and a bit of a sadist, threatening to deny the place a license if fences don't comply within a fraction of an inch. He is invaluable to the writers, Aline Brosh McKenna and Crowe himself, providing them with a device to generate a series of crises and deadlines through which Benjamin and his staff, working together, begin to bond. Cute young Lily's love for the animals soon begins to inspire Dylan to dial down and begin to love the zoo.
