'We Bought a Zoo' a story of hope and heart

All you need is 20 seconds of insane courage.

That's what Benjamin Mee tells his son Dylan will change his life for the best.

Because it worked for him, as we find out near the end of Cameron Crowe's unabashedly sweet family tale "We Bought a Zoo."

But early in the story, Dad takes his two kids to look at an old country house he might buy to get away from Los Angeles. That's when they first hear the sound of a lion's roar.

As the two kids come up over a berm, the music swells and the camera follows them so that we simultaneously discover what they discover: 200 exotic animals in cages, all in the back yard.

Cameron treats their discovery as a sublime magical moment, a perfect merger of music, emotion and subject.

Then he continues to stuff this comic drama with more magical moments, most of them involving Matt Damon, wild animals and the effusively cute Maggie Elizabeth Jones as his 7-year-old daughter Rosie.

Damon plays Benjamin Mee, a newspaper reporter and new widower. Six months earlier, his wife died of cancer, and Mee has tried to be both dad and mom to Rosie and her troubled teen brother Dylan (Colin Ford).

When Dylan, presumably acting out over his maternal loss, gets kicked out of school for theft, Dad decides it's time for a complete family change: new schools, new home.

He quits his job and starts searching for the perfect Mee home. Naturally, none fits the bill until he finds the one with the zoo in the back.

Benjamin's brother Duncan (Thomas Haden Church, uncharacteristically playing the reasonable one), begs him not to spend his inheritance on a stupid zoo that's been closed for several years.

But, of course, Benjamin does, and not only becomes responsible for the beasties, but for the small group of eccentric zoo staffers led by the ultra-adorable Kelly (Scarlett Johansson), because all zoo staffs have at least one person who looks like a Vogue model, don't they?

"We Bought a Zoo" tells two concurrent stories, the obvious one involving Benjamin's comic attempts to reopen the zoo in time to earn much-needed cash.

And the not-so-obvious one involving Benjamin, Rosie and Dylan quietly grieving their recent family loss.

This movie isn't above falling back on contrivances (do you think Benjamin might bond with the only hot member of his staff?) and shots of Rosie and the animals overloaded with cuteness.

But when Benjamin balks at the idea of putting down a suffering Bengal tiger, it's clearly a response to memories of his own wife's illness.

Damon carries this movie, and his restrained performance as an optimistic risk-taker gives the story its heart and narrative glue.

Patrick Fugit, Crowe's young alter-ego in his celebrated biographical drama "Almost Famous," walks around with a monkey on his back. That's about it.

But the increasingly watchable Elle Fanning sparks as Kelly's cousin Lily, a girl who senses Dylan's distress, and reaches out to him with unpredictable repercussions.

The efficient screenplay by Aline Broth McKenna (she also wrote the "Devil Wore Prada" script) is a loose adaptation of the memoirs of the real Benjamin Mee, actually a British journalist. (The original British location has been changed to California.)

Crowe continues to be the master of the magic moment - my favorite is Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger sharing their first kiss in "Jerry Maguire."

And in "We Bought a Zoo," they are just as good as 20 seconds of insane courage.

“We Bought a Zoo”

★ ★ ★

Starring:Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Elle Fanning, Patrick Fugit

Directed by: Cameron Crowe

Other: A 20th Century Fox release. Rated PG. 124 minutes