Film Feature: From Page to Screen, Fall 2011’s Biggest Adaptations

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We Bought a Zoo Photo credit: Paramount

Film: “We Bought a Zoo” (December 23)

Based On: Benjamin Mee’s stirring 2008 memoir about his family buying a small rural zoo while on the eve of a major personal tragedy.

Director: Cameron Crowe, former wunderkind who, admit it, kind of disappeared after “Vanilla Sky” and “Elizabethtown”.

Chances For Success: Modest. This is one of the stranger book adaptations of the season. If you only watched the trailer – and had no idea of who made the film or what the book was about – it might look just like a cute Hallmark movie with a surprisingly great cast (Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Elle Fanning). But, when you start digging into the details, the project gets weirder and weirder. Up front, you’ve got the involvement of Cameron Crowe, who was brought in as a director-for-hire and rewrote a script by Aline Brosh McKenna, which normally wouldn’t be that unusual… except that Crowe is known for his intensely personal films, so having him brought on as a director to adapt a script that adapts a book seems a bit “removed” from Crowe’s normal M.O. Aside from “Vanilla Sky”, Crowe normally works with material that originates with him and, be honest, “Vanilla Sky” wasn’t exactly Crowe’s finest hour. Then you’ve got the fact that “We Bought a Zoo” is a fictionalized adaptation of a real-life memoir, which, again, is a little weird. Why did they need to fictionalize Benjamin Mee’s life story? If it was exciting enough for a book, why didn’t it work for the movie version? The buzz around the movie just sort of smacks of a feel-good, Hollywood-ized story of personal triumph a la “The Blind Side”, but the involvement of Crowe and Matt Damon just don’t seem to fit in that model. If anyone can take that genre and turn it on its ear, it’s Cameron Crowe, but I just haven’t seen anything in the trailers or promotional material yet that make “We Bought a Zoo” seem like anything out of the ordinary.

Working Against It: lack of buzz; underwhelming trailers; that whole Ohio rural zoo shooting incident definitely didn’t help.

By TOM BURNS
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
tom@hollywoodchicago.com