You've got very few choices if you're looking for someone with name recognition and vestigial indie cred to score a big-budget holiday movie called We Bought a Zoo. The Flaming Lips have already done their Christmas movie soundtrack (and, yes, even have a song about Christmas at the zoo), and this is a Cameron Crowe film we're talking about, one that's being touted as "from the director of Jerry Maguire," as opposed to, say, "from the director of Almost Famous." So Jónsi it is, and you can't argue with the decision. As frontman of Sigur Rós, his vocals embody wide-eyed wonder without devolving into unbearable twee overload. So We Bought a Zoo naturally manifests as a work of mutual admiration and mutual benefit and everyone comes out of it feeling better about themselves. Which is to say that above all else, the level of risk and likelihood to satisfy is on par with that of, say, a Cameron Crowe movie being released for the holidays.
What Crowe gets out of this relationship is obvious. But if Jónsi actually ever needed an audio résumé to snag more jobs like this one, he could just slap down a USB of We Bought a Zoo and have it speak for his emergence as a unique, bankable commodity post-Ágætis Byrjun. This is partially by design: one Sigur Rós song is included, but it's an epochal one. Much like "Svefn-g-englar" (a major player on the soundtrack to Crowe's Vanilla Sky), "Hoppípolla" has become shorthand for a specific era of Sigur Rós, indicative of their brassier, bolder, and more concise songwriting that came after ( ) stretched their most inscrutable tendencies to infinity.
We Bought a Zoo gets its spark from key tracks off Jónsi's 2010 solo album, Go. Yes, it's hard to separate Jónsi from his day gig, but if We Bought a Zoo gets people to think of Go as far more than something other than a Sigur Rós spinoff, well, hopefully it'll inspire Jónsi to give us more of the same. Despite the greater prevalence of synthetic strings and dance beats, there's something more primal about these songs than those of latter day Sigur Rós. "Go Do" speaks to a universal ideal of action and while time will reveal how "Boy Lilikoi" fits into this particular movie, the childish primitivism would've worked just fine within Where the Wild Things Are (though perhaps with Disney animation rather than brooding browns and grays).
So what's the draw for those of us who already share Crowe's ardent Jónsi fanhood? That's where a shade over a half hour of new music he composed for the film comes in, with tasteful brass and string arrangements courtesy of Nico Muhly. It's heartening to hear about the film's working title and climactic scene being inspired by 2007 live documentary Heima and the director encouraging Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson to listen to certain Sigur Rós songs to get their energy correct for certain scenes (I expect plenty of beatific, skyward gazing). And certainly, it's exciting to imagine Jónsi coming from Iceland to hunker down with what Crowe calls a "a toy sample keyboard and a head full of ideas." But let's not forget that while Crowe brought Jónsi in for his uniquely whimsical and weighty approach, it's still whimsy-for-hire. So those trebly piano twinkles, elegiac tempos, octave-shifted vocals that hover and haunt like friendly ghosts? They're all here, treated with a bit of textural abrasion and arranged into small, three-minute packages with utilitarian titles like "Sun", "Brambles", and "Humming". Even one of two vocal tracks Jónsi composed specifically for the film hints a little to the melody from "White Christmas". Dude's a good company man.
Of course, it's all lovely and certainly more immediately engaging and compact than Jónsi's mostly-instrumental Riceboy Sleeps multimedia project from 2009. But it also has something going for it more important than gorgeous ambience: the Jónsi seal of quality. Does his work as an arranger and curator rank in the same percentile as his work as a vocalist? Not really, and even if starlit passages like "Sinking Friendships" or the luxuriant title track put in fine work with moving images, they aren't likely to dislodge anything from the upper echelon of his past work. But hopefully, offering the bold and evolving gestures of Jónsi's past decade in a relatively safe and compact design allows the possibility that a moviegoer might come out of the theater curious enough to parlay $10 into a meaningful relationship with Jónsi's music. And if that's the case, I think a lot of us are jealous of those who get to experience Sigur Rós for the first time in 2011.
