Monthly Archives: December 2015

  • We Bought a Zoo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Cameron Crowe (2011)

    This movie evidently wasn’t made with a British audience in mind.  The grand opening of the Rosemoor Animal Park takes place on the seventh of July – ‘Let’s go for 7/7’, says the zoo’s new owner, Benjamin Mee, on whose memoir Cameron Crowe’s film is based.  After that, 7/7 keeps being mentioned as a red letter day.   The movie wasn’t made with a pedant like me in mind either.  The precise date of the grand opening is Saturday 7 July 2010, a date which never happened – the film is repeatedly specific that this is the summer of 2010, when the seventh of July fell on a Wednesday.   Although the weather’s terrible during the week leading up to the zoo’s opening (strictly speaking, a re-opening:  it had fallen on hard times before Benjamin appeared), the sun shines on the righteous on the day itself.  But opening time arrives with not a visitor in sight – Benjamin’s fourteen-year-old son Dylan realises ‘something’s wrong’.  I was briefly hopeful that something would be the date but in fact a tree has blown down during the previous night’s storm, blocking the entrance to the animal park.   The Mee family and the Rosemoor staff discover hundreds of people queued up behind the fallen tree, unable to advance or to think of using mobile phones to report the problem or to climb over the tree trunk – although they manage to do this easily enough once the Mees invite them to do so.   The smiling public comes teeming into Rosemoor and the animal residents anthropomorphically join in the fun.   The poster for the film on the Wikipedia page shows Benjamin Mee with his infant daughter Rosie on his back and the chief zookeeper, Kelly Foster, at his side.   Benjamin is played by Matt Damon and Kelly by Scarlett Johansson.  Like them, the little girl, Maggie Elizabeth Jones, has fair hair which is gilded by the sun in a clear blue sky.  The poster reminds me of those pictures in Mormon handouts showing people and animals living together in a smiley earthly paradise.

    In spite of that association, there are no animals on the poster, only people, and this turns out to be significant.  I hadn’t expected the audience at the Odeon to be so full of children, some of them very young, but fair enough:  this is a family film the title of which suggests that exotic wildlife may be the stars of the show.  If parents take their kids to We Bought a Zoo expecting that they’re liable to be disappointed.  The children in the audience at Richmond were well behaved but they must often have been bored.  There are several episodes involving beautiful and/or sick and/or dangerous animals (the dangerous bits are mostly played for comedy) but the lion’s share of the film is devoted to the people in it – particularly Benjamin and Dylan (Colin Ford) and the problems they have with each other and coming to terms with the early death (you assume from cancer) of Katherine, a beloved wife and mother.  The consequences of Katherine’s recent death – it occurred not long before the family moved home and into the zoo – are a perfectly reasonable premise for the story but Cameron Crowe is so determined to accentuate the positive that he pretty well neuters this difficult situation.  The film begins with a voiceover – it’s the voice of an adolescent boy speaking of his father in a tone that conveys loving admiration.  In other words, Crowe assures us from the start that, by the end, Benjamin and Dylan will be getting along fine.  Amid the triumph of 7/7, Kelly Foster’s thirteen-year-old cousin Lily (Elle Fanning), who’s home-schooled and working at Rosemoor, asks Kelly if she prefers animals or people.   They cryptically agree people are best.  When you reduce human beings, as Cameron Crowe does here, to harmless eccentric pets, I prefer animals.

    We Bought a Zoo may be based on a true story but it proceeds according to the feelgood formulae and imperatives of commercial cinema rather than life:  (a) avoid unpleasantness; (b) maintain a regular supply of heartwarming moments.  A problem, in the world of this film, is something not just to be solved but to be solved quickly – or even ignored.  Benjamin develops a particular attachment to an elderly tiger called Spar.  It’s clear to Kelly and the other Rosemoor staff that this noble creature is on his last legs and should be put out of his misery but Benjamin won’t allow it to happen.   We’re not meant to see any cruelty in this – we’re meant only to connect Benjamin’s denial of terminal illness with the death of his wife.   Kelly is infuriated by his attitude, they have a row, and she storms off – to share a pizza with Benjamin’s kids.  Later the same evening, she and Benjamin are chatting as if nothing had happened, even though the question of what happens to Spar has still not been resolved.   A very few moments in the film are more tough-minded.   Talking with Rosie about Katherine, Benjamin says, ‘But you know mommy’s still near you, don’t you?’   His daughter nods her head surely; we see in Matt Damon’s eyes as he turns away that he doesn’t share the child’s belief.  In another scene, Benjamin and Dylan have a proper argument, and Benjamin gets genuinely angry.   Damon is very persuasive in this exchange.   When the son says of the zoo, ‘It’s your dream – you can’t impose your dream on me’, the father yells back, ‘Yes, I can – I can because it’s a good dream!’   This hints at something interestingly obstinate in Benjamin’s character but the moment passes quickly.  As usual with high-volume exchanges of home truths in Hollywood, the yelling is cathartic:  the tensions between Benjamin and Dylan are immediately expelled.

    The occasional moments of truthfulness expose the easy falsity of the rest of the screenplay, which Crowe wrote with Aline Brosh McKenna (best known for her adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada).  Benjamin first saw Katherine through the window of a local coffee shop, a place he finds (like many others) too painful to go near since her death.   In the film’s final scene, he returns there with Dylan and Rosie and re-enacts (embarrassingly) his original meeting with the children’s mother-to-be.  He does it with such conviction that Katherine (Stephanie Szostak) materialises at the table she sat at all those years ago – and she materialises not only to Benjamin but to Dylan and Rosie too.  The film’s last image is of her beautiful face smiling beatifically out of the screen:  she really is still near the family.  It’s hard to know what to make of this ending – or what it says about the prospect of Benjamin’s romance with Kelly developing as seemed likely when we last saw them together.  (There’s not a hint, of course, that a relationship with a new woman might create new tensions with Dylan.)  Cameron Crowe seems to think that if you’re excessively sentimental you somehow transcend sentimentality.   He enjoyed deserved success with Jerry Maguire (1996) and Almost Famous (2000) but his instinct to see the best in people plays him false here.  He and McKenna have written some decent dialogue but the words issue from the mouths of characters so preconceived as loveable that they’re weightless.  Crowe prefers people to animals to the extent that he’s negligent of the particular setting of We Bought a Zoo.  Although the closing legends tell us that the innovative approach to animal welfare used by the real Benjamin Mee’s Dartmoor wildlife park is internationally admired and imitated, you don’t get any sense of what this involves, beyond wanting the animals to have plenty of space to move around in.

    The casting of Matt Damon as Benjamin is far from imaginative, although he gives, as you’d expect, an intelligent performance – he doesn’t overwork his warmth and slightly cumbersome charm.   As Kelly, Scarlett Johansson is striking at first.  She looks great but she gives Kelly a straightforwardness of gesture and movement that’s slightly masculine.  Johansson is consistently effective as a temperamental complement to a more imposing co-star (Thora Birch in Ghost World, Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, and so on) but this is the first time I’d seen her start to create a distinct, individual character.  It’s unfinished business, though; as the film goes on, she softens into something more familiar.  Maggie Elizabeth Jones is naturally sparky as Rosie; Colin Ford, while physically believable as Matt Damon’s son, is relatively self-aware.  This fifteen-year-old is already an experienced actor in cinema and television and his acting lacks freshness.  Thomas Haden Church, though he lacks variety, is likeable as Benjamin’s exasperated accountant brother.   Other actors in the smaller parts – playing characters that are one-dimensional – tend to overdo it:  Angus MacFadyen as the emphatically Caledonian carpenter at the zoo is the best of this group.  The overacting extends to Elle Fanning but she’s distinctive enough to hold your attention and gets across an intensity in Lily’s awkward enthusiasm for the morose Dylan.  John Michael Higgins is a feared and loathed zoo inspector:  even the film’s villain comes right in the end by approving a renewed operating licence for Rosemoor.  According to Wikipedia, Local Hero was one of Crowe’s inspirations here and an important part of persuading Matt Damon to play Benjamin:  Peter Riegert makes a brief appearance as Benjamin’s publisher.  There is a variety of music on the soundtrack, much of it wet.

    17 March 2012

  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stephen Daldry (2011)

    It’s a sad story and a poor film:  the combination makes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a dispiriting (and long) two hours.  Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel is formally inventive and self-confident.  Stephen Daldry’s screen version, from a screenplay by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), is neither.  The book may be successful only in parts – but those parts include the main one:  the first person narrator, nine year old Oskar Schell, whose beloved father, Thomas, died on 9/11 when the South Tower went down.   This extraordinary kid has more than a touch of Asperger’s in his obsessive volatility and the mass of facts and figures he can keep in his head but he has a capacity for off-centre introspection too.  The character is a big challenge for a child actor – he needs to be on Oskar’s singular wavelength and to get inside his whirring brain.  One of the reasons I felt unhappy throughout the film was because it seemed unkind to think so badly of Thomas Horn, who plays Oskar.  This fourteen-year-old – he looks like an adolescent Frank Lampard – can act.  In terms of technical skill, he’s in a different class from, say, the children in Hugo.  And Stephen Daldry has had great success in the past directing boys, of different ages, on screen – Jamie Bell in Billy Elliot, Jack Rovello in The Hours.  Horn isn’t as free a performer as either of them, though, and his accomplishment is self-defeating.  Oskar is a brilliantly unstable personality; Thomas Horn is too evidently in control and his lack of essential eccentricity means that he isn’t funny.  In the book, Oskar’s humour and ability to make you laugh are crucial in complementing his anguish.

    Although Oskar is in all but a few scenes of the film, he’s not the presence that he is in the novel.  The amount of voiceover narrative is modest but Daldry and Roth haven’t found anything to replace Oskar’s persistent voice.  The picture is handsomely shot by Chris Menges but it’s full of images and montages which, because they don’t express any point of view, are empty technical flourishes.  The soundtrack is dominated by an incontinent Alexandre Desplat score.  Oskar isn’t the sole narrator of the book:  his paternal grandparents also tell the story of their courtship, their lives together, their separation in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.   Jonathan Safran Foer connects 9/11 with other atrocities.  This works well enough when Oskar chooses Hiroshima as the subject for a school project but references to the bombing of Dresden in the grandparents’ recollections seem to be stretching a point.  It’s not much of a point anyway – just a fairly obvious reminder that Americans and their allies have shown themselves capable of inflicting as much harm on civilians as the 9/11 terrorists were.  Much of the grandparents’ story is in epistolary form.  The letters that may or may not have been received or read by those to whom they’re addressed are the basis of the novel’s failure-to-communicate theme, elaborated by the grandfather’s decision to stop speaking (and write things down instead to keep a conversation going), the halting walkie-talkie dialogue between Oskar and his grandmother whose apartment is on the opposite side of the road from the block where Oskar and his mother live, and the messages left on cell phones on what Oskar calls ‘the worst day’.  The accumulation of these variously problematic forms of communication is overworked by Safran Foer but it is at least coherent.   The paring down of it in the film reduces what’s left – mostly the grandfather’s pen-and-paper responses to Oskar’s torrent of spoken words – to contrived oddity.  It’s disconnected and tedious – not least because, of course, the old man’s speed-writing still slows scenes down.

    Jonathan Safran Foer is a showoff writer, especially in his linguistic grandstanding.  (I liked Extremely Loud enough that I then started on his earlier success Everything Is Illuminated, which I found unreadable beyond fifty pages.)  His attempts to universalise Oskar’s story work only in part.   At one point in the novel, Safran Foer, through Oskar, perceives that, ultimately, we’re all trapped in a burning skyscraper.  The insight is offensive, since the victims of 9/11 were trapped in a real burning skyscraper as well as a metaphorical one.  He’s more successful in making you feel, through the unique details of Oskar’s horror and bereavement, for all the young children who lost parents on 9/11.  The text of the book is interleaved with photographs of the falling man and assorted other visuals.  I guess many people will regard this as meretricious and tastelessly eye-catching but I could accept it.  The photographs not only connect with Oskar’s obsessions but seem to admit that these are the definitive description of 9/11, which a fictional treatment can’t get beyond.  What holds the novel together are the detail and relentlessness of Oskar’s fertile imagination, and his quest to find the lock for a key he’s discovered in his father’s wardrobe, in an envelope with the name ‘Black’ on it.  In life, Thomas Schell loved to design complicated, clue-based ‘assignments’ for his son:  Oskar loved to carry these out, in partnership with his father, and the search for the lock is a post-mortem continuation of the family tradition.  This is all an admittedly obvious metaphor for the boy’s trying to make sense of the baffling fact of his father’s death (although Thomas Schell’s body was never found) but it works because the quest for the lock is realised in a highly individual way.

    That quest gives the story road-movie potential and the succession of characters that Oskar meets on his journey – working his way, on foot and alphabetically, through all the Blacks in the local directory – are wonderful.  As I read the book, I kept thinking how good these encounters could be in a dramatisation; when I saw the cast for the film adaptation, the prospect was mouthwatering.  It’s one of the biggest letdowns of Extremely Loud on screen that there’s never any momentum to Oskar’s search and that most of his meetings are abbreviated to almost nothing – no more than is needed to fix each Black that he visits with a single characteristic or two.  As Abby Black, Oskar’s first port of call on his journey, Viola Davis is once again very impressive – she’s able, with great economy and in spite of the thin writing, to suggest a complete character – and, although the staging of the crucial later scene between Oskar and Abby’s (ex-) husband isn’t imaginative, Jeffrey Wright plays the latter sensitively.  For the most part, though, the actors in smaller roles are wasted.   John Goodman as the apartment block doorman Stan and Zoe Caldwell as Oskar’s grandmother have virtually nothing to do.

    Max von Sydow is powerfully expressive in the early stages when, as the silent Thomas Schell Sr, he’s listening to Oskar and to the voice messages the boy’s father left at the apartment on the morning of 9/11.  But even von Sydow can’t transcend the writing-not-speaking routine.  (This is one of the ideas in the novel that’s ridiculous once it’s exposed to physical reality.  After not very long, the only thought it provokes is wondering how many notebooks the grandfather must get through.)   Tom Hanks’s warmth and flair for eccentricity make his casting as Oskar’s father understandable but he looks a bit too old for the part and the lack of spark between him and Thomas Horn is disappointing.  Oskar feels cut off from his mother, Linda, which probably gives Sandra Bullock an advantage over Hanks.  She gives a well-judged performance although the climactic scene in which she explains to her son that she knew what he was up to all along when he left the block with his backpack is so protracted that it dilutes the power this revelation has in the book.  (The idea that his mother, unbeknown to Oskar, is keeping an eye on him gives added poignancy to his father’s no longer being there to do so.)

    The film’s rendering of how Oskar and other people in his life get the better of their own fears and weaknesses is so pallid that it’s not even annoying.   It says everything about this movie that its most emotionally affecting moments come when Linda Schell takes a call at work to learn from her husband that the work meeting he’s gone to was in the World Trade Center.  She looks out from her office window and watches the burning Twin Towers as Thomas assures her that he’s fine.   Sandra Bullock plays and Tom Hanks speaks this conversation very well but it’s a generic 9/11 scene – it doesn’t connect at all with the particularity of Jonathan Safran Foer’s treatment of the subject.   It’s also confusing:  if Thomas knows Linda is at work, why does he keep leaving messages on the answering machine at home (unless he expects Oskar to be picking them up – but why would he?)?

    Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a smart title.  It’s simply right for 9/11.  It includes what are revealed, in the book’s (though not the film’s) narrative, to be Oskar’s two favourite adverbs.   It refers specifically to the way his grandmother sounds when she inexpertly tries to take part in the two-way radio conversations with Oskar.  It refers more largely to the intolerability of feeling too much about other people and the impact of losing them.  This is why Oskar can’t pick up the phone in the apartment and Thomas has to leave his final message, and why Oskar then buys a replacement answering machine and secretes the old one containing the messages so that his mother and grandmother don’t have to hear them.  The film, rather desperately, justifies its name in its closing stages when Linda Schell discovers a(n unfinished) book that chronicles an earlier assignment that Thomas set for Oskar – the front page lettered with ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’. Safran Foer’s title is, as well as clever, irritating (partly because it’s clever).   Critics enraged by the film have been able to get their own back by cheaply insulting it as ‘Extremely Tiresome and Incredibly Manipulative’, or words to that effect.  One of the few elements of the novel that emerges clearly here is the metaphoric aspect of the story that Thomas tells Oskar about the disappeared sixth borough of New York City.  It comes eventually to stand for the community of the dead of 9/11 (Thomas’s sixth voice message was his last).  ‘The Sixth Borough’ might have been a better title for the film.  On the subject of numbers:  this is Stephen Daldry’s fourth cinema feature and his first thoroughgoing failure.

    18 February 2012

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