While he’s certainly been keeping busy with his Elton John and Pearl Jam music documentaries, it’s even more heartening to see Cameron Crowe back behind the camera for a film. His latest effort, We Bought a Zoo, has just pushed out its first trailer over at Apple.
Adapted from former Guardian journalist Benjamin Mee’s memoir about his family’s purchasing and restoring Dartmoor Wildlife Park, Zoo transplants the story to California and casts Matt Damon as Mee.
He’s lost his wife to cancer and is trying to deal with raising two children on his own. When he finds what he thinks is the perfect new home, he realises it comes with a few added quirks: namely, 47 animals, including lions, monkeys and zebras that have to be taken care of. Aided by his brother (Thomas Haden Church), who alternates between a sunny outlook and thinking he’s nuts, and the remaining zoo employees (including Scarlett Johansson’s fetching Kelly Foster), Mee must figure out how to keep his family together while doing right by the menagerie he now owns.
While The Devil Wears Prada’s Aline Brosh McKenna wrote the first draft of the script, Crowe has polished it and from the looks of this has brought his particular blend of emotion and a killer soundtrack to the movie. There’s a definite Jerry Maguire vibe to the whole thing (particularly the moment when Mee quits his job) and we’re hopeful the solid cast will make this one a winner. Crowe could use a break after Elizabethtown…
We Bought a Zoo is out on December 23.