Review

Cameron Crowe is a romantic bordering on utopian, and his authentic family values—biological and surrogate—shine through in his enchanting We Bought a Zoo, loosely adapted from Benjamin Mee’s memoir. “We” is Matt Damon, in shock from the death of his wife, and his two kids, who move into a house with a foundering menagerie and a staff including Scarlett Johansson as the head keeper. The movie is formulaic (money crises, runaway snakes, a villainous inspector), but the grief-whimsy continuum that Daldry labors so hard to trace in Extremely Loud comes easily to Crowe. The score by Jónsi—twinkly, with elegiac underpinnings—gives the animals a supernatural vibe, and Damon and Colin Ford as his teen son have an affecting hesitancy, their hearts hovering between the living and the dead. — David Edelstein