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Grizzly Man

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1 star:		(54)

 

 

The amazing thing about Timothy Treadwell was that he survived 13 summers in the Alaska wilderness, living among gigantic, ferocious grizzly bears, until one of them finally ate him. Treadwell was a combination environmental activist, societal rebel, filmmaker, nutcase and holy fool. In other words, he was not unlike Werner Herzog, director of "Grizzly Man," the brilliant new documentary about Treadwell's life and horrible death. Herzog is much more self-aware than Treadwell ever was, and has much more of a sense of reality and irony. But as a filmmaker drawn to impossible projects ("Fitzcarraldo," "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"), he feels a definite kinship to Treadwell, even as he's appalled by Treadwell's egregious lapses of judgment. Treadwell shot more than 100 hours of film of himself and his beloved grizzlies, and Herzog culls the best of that film for "Grizzly Man." In his own film footage, Treadwell showed himself consistently to be an arrested adolescent, conflating the terrifying behemoths he lived among with his collection of teddy bears. (He speaks constantly of the mortal danger of living among grizzlies, but never quite seems to believe his own words.) Yet he also captured some of the most amazing nature scenes ever recorded, and Herzog respects him for that. (In his narration, Herzog also expresses great tenderness toward Amie Huguenard, the woman who loved Treadwell, followed him to the wilderness despite her fear of bears, and shared his horrible fate.) Whereas Treadwell sought order in nature, and believed the grizzlies loved him as much as he loved them, Herzog sees nothing in Treadwell's story except the workings of a chaotic universe sending one more dreamer to his doom. But because Treadwell's dreams were so outsized, Herzog sees him as a brother. So, thanks to Herzog, do we.

I liked this movie but I have to agree with all the reviews (who rate it both good and bad) that say Timothy Treadwell is emotionally and mentally ill. It's true: the most amazing thing about his story was that he wasn't killed and eaten any sooner.

I sympathize with the family and friends for their loss, but I can't gloss over what a crazy, grandstanding and ultimately suicidal "mission" this was. He wasn't exactly Diane Fossey, who literally fought poachers off the mountain gorillas in Rwanda--these bears were in a state park.

Absolutely NOTHING in science or life tells Treadway or anyone else that it's safe to live with bears. He ventures into the wild and lives in a constant state of delusion, even as the bears kill and eat each other, his cute little foxes, the adorable little cubs. As Herzog points out, there's nothing to support Treadway's fantasy world of harmony in the bloody Alaskan wilderness.

GRIZZLY MAN is a fascinating story but I have to agree with the reviews which compare the interviews with BEST IN SHOW or A MIGHTY WIND.

(If you were fascinated by this story, check out the book INTO THE WILD, about another young man who disappeared and died in the Alaskan bush in an attempt to live off the land. GORILLAS IN THE MIST is both a book and a movie about Diane Fossey, another controversial person who fought on behalf of endangered animals).

What a fascinating film this is about nature and man in it. German director Werner Herzog has made his share of great fiction movies about men embracing their id in the wilds of nature at the expense of their sanity, so the late Timothy Treadwell, the "Grizzly Man" that serves as the movie's title, is a perfect documentary subject. Treadwell got closer to these giant bears than anyone during the last 13 summers of his life until he and his girlfriend were killed by one.

Herzog mostly uses Treadwell's own footage to reveal the story, and the results are unlikely and extraordinary. We see the bears in their element - on a plain and on an island of trees Treadwell dubs "The Grizzly Maze." Katmai National Park, scattered on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, is a visual wonder, and the intimacy Treadwell achieves with the bears allows him to capture a bear fight as intense and vicious as any nature film I've ever seen. Uncut and filmed at close range, it is a titanic, beautiful struggle that involves primal strategy and raw strength. It is riveting as a later shot of bears sprinting on a beach is playful.

But there is much more.

Treadwell uses his camera as a confessional. A decent man with a reasonably laudible aims morphs into a profane, disturbed meglomaniac whose emotional issues likely drove him to Alaska to live with bears who tolerate him but, as the footage shows, don't consider him a family friend. We learn he is a failed actor, a mild con artist, a loner who pretends on film he is alone when he is not, and, above all, a man who plays at being virtuous when he quite clearly thinks he is owed more acclaim and gratitude that he gets.

Herzog first shows his temper in a hilarious scene where a fox steals Treadwell's hat. Later, Treadwell vents when tourists come to photograph the bears. Later still, he launches a vulgar rant against the National Park Service that makes "Grizzly Man" unsuitable for kids but essential to the man and the film. Treadwell thinks he's out there for the bears. He's really out there for himself. So anyone of us would be, for we do not go to the zoo so the animals can see us. We go to see the animals.

Treadwell needs to declare himself, to say "I am." Bears don't. Bears act out of instinct and conditioning. Treadwell expresses, and does so out of thought. Without stating it, "Grizzly Man" is a convincing argument against the evolutionary theory that suggests man arose from the clay of beasts. It's also a compelling case against Treadwell's mission, which seems to be little more than hanging around bears and filming them. Treadwell claims, quite often, to be "protecting" them. From what?

His other mission is education. Stunning as the photography is, what I learned from "Grizzly Man" about bears is that they're bears. That in itself is divine but Treadwell wants to go further and impose human traits on them, which seem absurd the day he finds a baby grizzly's skull picked clean by other bears. Finally Treadwell gets dumb and stays in the "Maze" later in the summer than he should. The familiar bears are gone, replaced by one who eventually kills him. He probably captures the bear on tape, and we see a close-up of its beady brown eyes. Not a flicker of humanity. We shouldn't expect there to be.

This is one of the most riveting documentaries of recent times. And only Werner Herzog could have made its many cogs mesh so tellingly and troublingly. By chronicling Timothy Treadwell's life and providing sympathetic but often-corrective commentary, Herzog shows how one man's benighted quest led him to filter out unpleasant facts in favor of self-aggrandizing fancies about his role in the scheme of things. (Treadwell not only looks a bit like the late John Denver but also seems plagued by the same egotistical drive to play the high-profile hero.)

Through Treadwell's footage as well as Herzog's own well-chosen interview sequences, we see the man whole: his naïveté and childlike delight, his folly, his self-dramatization, and the inner madness for which the natural world was perhaps a convenient but ultimately fatal escape hatch.

As soon as Treadwell styles himself the "protector" of millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness where grizzly bears are the top predator, we know that this man is headed for a horrid end. In his hyperbolic, self-indulgent protestations of love and protection toward the land and its creatures, we hear the unmistakable accent of a megalomaniacal solipsist -- a man whose magical thinking allows him to live in a "peaceable kingdom" where he can rewrite the rules of nature and reprimand her creatures for being what they are. As King Lear would say, "That way madness lies."

It is one of the film's many ironies that when Treadwell actually comes upon what he assumes to be bear poachers, he consciously chooses to remain hidden. Apparently, he planned to report the incident: on camera he fastidiously notes the time (down to the 18th second!) when the filming took place. But one can only conclude that when it comes to real cases, the "Great Protector" is nothing more than the "Great Pretender."

To his credit, Treadwell and the photographic assistant he'd prefer us to forget about (to bolster his self-made-man-from-Australia myth) captured many extraordinary features of Alaskan wildlife that we might otherwise never see. At the same time, however, by becoming a leading character in the show, Treadwell may also be unwittingly falsifying what we see: is this how the animals would behave in the presence of chroniclers to whom they were *not* habituated or whose presence they could *not* detect? Maybe we need both kinds of documentation.

Perhaps most striking of all is the paradoxical sweet-and-sour view of nature that Treadwell repeatedly displays -- here infantilizing some of the most ferocious carnivores on the continent (often giving them cartoonish monikers like "Mr. Chocolate," as if naming were taming), there acknowledging the deadly danger of what he is doing. Both sides of the paradox fuel Treadwell's self-aggrandizement: he can treat these creatures like oversize pets while reveling in whatever special personal charm keeps him safe. In reality, he was just supremely lucky that before October 2003, he had encountered no bear desperately hungry enough to see him and girlfriend Amie Huguenard as a two-course meal. Treadwell may have died doing what *he* wanted to do (and he may well have wanted to die in just this way), but we have good reason to doubt Amie's assent to a comparable fate as the desirable way to go.

For me at least, the scene that most tellingly sums up Treadwell's faulty vision finds him crouched in a tent during a violent rainstorm. (He has, to his mind, virtually summoned up the deluge by registering a near-infantile tantrum of protest with all the higher powers, so that the rivers may flow abundantly and "his" starving bears may catch their fill of fish. Curiously, the same man who bewails cannibalized bear cubs and dead little foxes shows no sympathy for the salmon that will get crushed alive in the mouths of bears -- yet another example of Treadwell-style tunnel vision.) We soon see him snuggling a favorite toy from childhood that had first appeared only moments earlier during an interview with his grieving parents. And whaddya know? It's a teddy bear, that adorable stuffed animal that gives us all our first false lesson in bear lore. I suspect that Treadwell never fully accepted the shocking difference between real bears and their childhood impostors. Decades ago at the Denver Zoo, I saw a sign that offered a curt corrective to the Great TB Fallacy: "All bears are dangerous." You'd better believe it, Winnie-the-Pooh!

I think part of Treadwell believed that, but a stronger part didn't want this inconvenient fact to block his irrational impulse to "domesticate" an untamable force of nature to which native people (who have lived in bear country for millennia) have the good sense to give a wide berth of awe and respect. Neither boundless optimism nor American pioneering spirit nor Edenic wishful thinking can trump nature's rules of engagement. The natural world is a dense network of largely invisible trip wires: we humans have no foolproof sense for detecting whether we have transgressed another creature's invisible perimeter-alert system before we're too far inside to escape its tooth and claw. Nature responds simply and effectively to foolhardiness: her creatures devour the unwary and the unwise.

At one point during a manic tirade against the National Park Service, Treadwell screams, "Animals rule!" -- or something to that effect. Yes! But for all his immersion in the wild, the self-absorbed Treadwell never grasps the nature of Nature. Where wild animals rule, tread well and wisely -- or not at all.

The primary subject of this documentary is Timothy Treadwell, a man who chose to live among grizzly bears for 7 summers in the Alaskan wilderness before finally being mauled and eaten.

Before seeing this movie, I expected Treadwell to come across as a dedicated ecologist who had perhaps developed an overly romantic view of the the natural world. Instead he turns out to be an arrogant, self-absorbed wanna-be actor who seemed to be more interested in creating a public persona of "mythical proportions" than actually doing what was in the best interests of the bears themselves.

The film provides ample biographical information on Treadwell. He began as a kid from Florida who suffered his first major setback when he lost his college scholarship for diving due to a back injury. He then went to Hollywood to pursue an acting career. But apparently went into a downward spiral of drinking and drugs after losing out to Woody Harrelson for a role on the TV show "Cheers". Treadwell also appears to have manic-depression or some other serious but untreated mood disorder. This is reflected in his own film footage where he adapts an highly annoying "character voice," perhaps intended to appeal to children. Treadwell also goes on at great length about his problems with women, his insecurities, his "greatness", and various other rants and raves. The disturbing point being that he usually places himself, rather than the bears he claims to be researching, at the center of attention.

The high point of this movie is definitely the beautiful scenes of the Alaskan wilderness. The director Werner Herzog also creates an intriguing portrait which caused me to think about the underlying psychological reasons for the bizzare actions of the clearly troubled Treadwell. But ultimately Treadwell's own narcissism and foolishness make his unfortunate ending seem like the fulfillment of a "death wish" rather than the heart moving loss of an innocent victim.

I must admit that my first reaction to this film was not immediately positive; Herzog's presence seemed overbearing and intrusive, and Treadwell himself was a figure so tragic as to be somewhat alienating. And yet I found that, days later, I found I was still thinking about it, still mesmerized by the questions it raised. How truly unsympathetic was Treadwell? Should I be somewhat jealous of him, for all the joy and depth of experience he found in his work? I have, as few have, found little in life so enriching and gratifying as what Treadwell appeared to find in the wilderness; are thirteen summers of that worth an early, terrible end?

So I saw the film again; I recommend that others do the same, if they find themselves at all intrigued after the first viewing. And then I saw the film again, and again. What I found with time -- as I let it develop into an obsession -- was an incredibly complex artwork, capable of provoking rich and sometimes startling meanings.

At its core, I now understand Grizzly Man to be a document of the desperate search for kinship in an alienating world; an insight into what happens when, failing to find an object which fulfills our desires, we resort to projecting our desires onto whatever might hold them. For as Treadwell imagines the bears to be his companions, so too does Herzog attempt to imagine Treadwell as a filmmaker of his own lineage, a comrade in the struggle to capture beauty in a wild and unforgiving universe. Intentionally or not, Herzog's intrusion into this documentary comes to parallel Treadwell's own intrusion into the bears' wild habitat; and we come to realize that the strange and austere beauty he finds in Treadwell's footage is more Herzog's invention than it is a product of the man who captured the images.

One reviewer has noted the failure of this film to acknowledge the "culture of artifice" which drove its participants to such extremes. I would argue, however, that both this phenomenon and the underlying anomie are central to the film; and that acknowledging them would only serve to undermine their tension and delegitimize them as themes, for to do so would require Herzog to depersonalize them, to suppose that he was somehow outside of or above their influence, and in doing so allow the audience to treat them as foreign objects as well. Instead, we come to recognize them empathically, and are left on our own to decide their personal meaning.

In short, this film manages to span the full spectrum between fascination with the other and deepest introspection. And that versatility is a rare quality, truly deserving of five perfect stars.

"We took four garbage bags of human remains out of that bear."

That horrific statement, made by one of the people who assisted with the recovery of the bodies of Timothy Treadwall and Ann Huguenard will stay with me for a long time.

"Grizzly Man", the new documentary from Werner Herzog, follows the life of Treadwell, giving us as complete a view as possible of a man who spent thirteen summers living with grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness. Painting a portrait of a strange, reclusive man, Herzog had a valuable resource in Treadwell himself. During the last five summers of his life, Treadwell took a video camera and recorded hundreds of hours of video of his interactions with the bears he called his friends.

What drove Treadwell to spend thirteen summers alone with these wild animals? An interview with his parents relates his frustrated attempts to become an actor; at one point he was close to getting the role eventually given to Woody Harrelson on "Cheers". When he lost this part, he was devastated, contributing to his newfound passion.

Treadwell gained a certain amount of notoriety. After starting a foundation, he began to visit classrooms and show his videotapes and talk to students about bears. This lead to an appearance on David Letterman's show. Letterman jokingly asks "I'm not going to open up the newspaper one day and find out you were killed by a bear am I?" eliciting laughter from his audience. It seems easy to make fun of Treadwell; slightly effeminate, with a Prince Valiant haircut, he is clearly uncomfortable around humans, taking everything they say very seriously. Treadwell seems much more comfortable interacting with the bears; the more time he spent alone with them, the more comfortable he became around them. Through interviews with his friends, it becomes clear that he favors the solitude and `friendship' of these beasts having difficulty relating to humans. He constantly and consistently professes his love for various bears and foxes and in the next breath warns viewers about the danger he faces on a daily basis. Many times, while taping various segments in the wilderness, he begins a tirade against some branch of the government or other. Basically, anyone he felt slighted by and he felt this way about a lot of people.

Herzog intercuts interviews with friends who describe Treadwell's passions and with various experts who seem disturbed at what he was attempting. These experts seem astonished that he would try to become a friend of these wild creatures. They state that the bears will never ultimately accept him, which Treadwell also seems to realize. He was a hyperactive guy; often immediately after talking about the dangers, he would immediately declare his love for some particular bear or fox.

Ultimately, everyone would be proven right. Treadwell, and his girlfriend, Amy, would be killed by a bear towards the end of his thirteenth summer with them. Their remains were found by the pilot, and friend, who ferried Treadwell back and forth to his summer home.

At their campsite, they found the last videotapes Treadwell made. Herzog shows the last few recorded images of Treadwell, as he stands near a new bear and talks about the animal ultimately suspected of killing them. After the images on the tape end, Herzog found that the machine was still running, but with the lens cap on capturing the sounds of their death at the paws of a hungry bear. Herzog listens to this, with headphones on, and then promptly tells Treadwell's friend, who has the tape, that she should never listen to it. Thankfully, we don't hear it either.

"Grizzly Man" is a fascinating portrait of a unique, obsessed, lonely man who clearly didn't fully understand the beasts he called his friends. Riveting filmmaking.

Herzog is amazing and when he decides to do something real by pulling off another documentary, like his award winning 'My Best Fiend', you just know it is going to be something worth seeing. Here Herzog edits from over 100 hours of video footage the story of Timothy Treadwell's risky, and ultimately deadly, self-sponsored grizzly bear research in the wilderness of the Alaska Peninsula. It must be seen to be believed, could be one of the best films of 2005/2006, and certainly raises a hair or two, including the final moments where the ecentric Treadmill probably filmed himself with his murderer. Just watch this and be amazed at the stunning one on one bear footage never seen in the wild this way before, coupled with the local coroner describing how Timothy recorded himself on camera, telling his girlfriend to run away while screaming as the bear tore his skull open. Shockingly profound and at times seriously touching, this is wholly original and confusingly stunning. You have never seen anything like it before, nor will you again.

So much garbage passing for entertainment; when you come across something that rivets you it really stands out. Such is the case with this work. Treadwell is obviously mentally disturbed and he serves up much about himself to mock and deride. All the while, you cannot ignore his authenticity. Yes, he was self-absorbed, delusional, probably closeted, and insane. How on earth he was able to withstand the infamous Alaskan mosquito swarms boggles my mind. They're the size of small birds, it seems. His friends were odd folk. Aside from that, Herzog masterfully pieces Treadwell's footage with mesmerizing skill and his voiceover seems to convey a personal sadness for the story he is telling. Treadwell himself proved adept with the camera as many of his shots are composed with bears well-placed within the frame. His childish nature may have some rolling their eyes in embarrassment, but you can't deny that it's all real to him. This is one of the best films I've ever seen, and I cannot wait for the dvd. Also features terrific music by Richard Thompson.

After reading some remarkable reviews of Grizzly Man and catching much of it on Discovery Channel, I was very interested in seeing the DVD. The film first appears to be a documentary about the misguided naturalist Timothy Treadwell who befriended grizzly bears in Alaska and was eaten alive in 2003 by one. As a local native points out, what Treadwell did was irresponsible in that he crossed the line that had been drawn 7,000 years ago between humans and grizzlies - that is to avoid one another and maintain a respect for the danger one another poses. Treadwell also claimed that he was protecting the bears but his death resulted in the doom of the bear that killed him. When Herzog samples the tape of Treadwell's last moments (along with his girlfriend's), Herzog advises one of Treadwell's surviving ex-girlfriends to destroy the tape and never view the coroner's photographic evidence - just the coroner's descriptions are enough to chill one to the bone.

The director, Werner Herzog demonstrates again what a master filmmaker he truly is. Herzog also created the film that Treadwell never made by editing hundreds of hours of footage into a film that tells the story Treadwell would have himself made. But Herzog does not allow the audience to be seduced into the sentimentalism that caused Treadwell's death - Herzog indeed interrupts Treadwell's narration and explicitly disagrees with the notion that animals and humans can live in a harmonious relationship and indeed shows the fact that the worlds of humans and bears are separate and there is little room for the intersection of the two.

The extended on the DVD is even more remarkable as Herzog demonstrates his depth of understanding as the soundtrack is scored. One of the engineers asks whether he wants the music as background music and Herzog declares that he never has background music in his films. Herzog coaxes out a sound quality that Treadwell would certainly have been proud of - a haunting and poignant score. Yet again, Herzog won't allow us to be lulled into fantasy - when Treadwell is seen wading into a river with a large grizzly Herzog tells his cellist that he wants a strange sound - it is really a perverse sound that shows the perversity of a man reaching out to pet a grizzly bear. And in other scenes, such as one where two grizzlies are fighting - or one where a cub dismembered by an adult bear the music takes on an atonal quality. Indeed we see a pianist applying sheet metal screws and paperclips to his piano strings to produce a sound that reveals that nature is not 'harmonious'.

By the end of the film Treadwell can be seen as both a passionate man and one who is deeply troubled and a victim of his own imagination. Herzog allows us to feel sympathy and pathos for this tragic figure - a man who knew the fate that awaited him but couldn't resist.