We Bought a Zoo: Imagine your heart in a Chinese handcuff finger cuff

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

So, a somewhat grey San Francisco summer day, and perhaps that seeped into our collective souls.  So we did what we often do on days like this:  order a pizza.  And you gotta do something while waiting for pizza, so, since also our collective libidos were similarly muted, we did what most American couples do:  "Wanna watch a movie?"

We chose pretty quickly, in what is that usually a painful process of movie selection, and settled on "We Bought a Zoo."  I thought Heather would go for "Man on a Ledge," being it has her heartthrob Sam Worthington as lead.  Who knows;  she's a complex, deep, rich, and at times capricious mind.  You learn to roll with it.

The trailer made it look like a tear-duct squeezing heart yanker, which doesn't usually draw me.  But something in this one, plus a "I thought it would suck but it really didn't" review from a friend made me pull it from the all-movies list and she bit.

Tear jerker would be a mild way of categorizing the film.  I was on the verge of tears for the whole two hours, and then wracked with sobs through the whole credits.  Now, I cried at the end of "Armageddon," so I admit to being a softie.  But you'd have to have had all your mirror neurons destroyed by the mirror neuron equivalent of an EMP bomb to not shed a tear for this one.  There's a recent widower, a young boy, a cherubic 7 year old girl, Scarlet Johanssan looking sweet and awkward and totally not sucking actress-wise, a found family (in the sense of "found art," beauty made out of random bits of detritus), and a lot of rare animals who, if not for our hero, would be euthanized.

Plus, the sound track, by an artist named Jonsi (with a few songs by Cat Stephens and others), is ethereal and seems to be tailor made to evoke both sadness and uplift.  The Icelandic band Sigur Ros (here's a sample) has a track on the movie, and if you listen to their music, you'll see what I mean.  It's oddly the right choice, both manipulative and true, giving you the experience of Benjamin's (Matt Damon's character) grief and his hope.

But beyond that, the film is so moving beyond its Hollywood schlock trappings because it actually gets into something true about human experience and grief and inevitable loss, of the simultaneity of joy and connection and loss and sadness.  That's why I, as they say, lost my shit at the end of the movie.  Sitting next to the love of my life, what was authentic that was magnified by the film was the truth that one day, either Heather or me are going to be in Benjamin's position.  There's no getting around that, and there's no contradiction with the joy of this human life.  That's what the film essentially presents, and with a rather surprising truthfulness, that life is neither joy nor sorrow, but both, inextricably and astoundingly intertwined.