Grizzly Man
Absolutely brilliant documentary about Timothy Treadwell, an eccentric conservationist and animal activist, who believed he was charged with the mission of protecting an enclave of grizzly bears from poachers, so much so that he went and lived among them until he and his girlfriend met their horrifying but inevitable end.
The film is crafted mainly from Treadwell’s vast collection of video diaries of his time in the Alaskan wilderness, and from director Werner Herzog’s interviews with Treadwell’s friends and fellow activists as he tries to piece together an answer to why Treadwell did what he did.
Was he nothing more than a stupid delusional attention-seeking idiot destined to meet a ghastly fate? A hyperactive kid with delusions of grandeur who believed he, and he alone, had to protect the bears and educate the public to save them – and was ready to be a martyr in the process? Or was he just a lonely and misunderstood man who rejected society and where some people at their darkest turn to god, he went to bears, and ended up considering them his only true friends?
What Treadwell is clearly guilty of is childishly sentimentalising the wild and is ignorant to the natural bloodlust his bear friends are capable of. His plea for their love borders on pathetic. He touches a bear’s shit to feel closer to them. For all his talk of respect and protecting them from man he was happy to disrespect them by invading his habitat himself, oblivious to this hypocrisy. He is a truly fascinating figure. One minute you can’t help but feel respect towards him for dedicating his life for something he truly believed in, the next you want to shake some sense into him when he starts referring to himself as a ruler of bears and foxes.
But despite all this Grizzly Man is not a character assassination piece, and not a celebration not of his utopian but extremely naïve environmental conservation ideas, but of a brave filmmaker, of a man who despite his questionable intentions captured an array of beautiful and moving images of these powerful creatures.
Treadwell’s filming ambition is far above just waving a camera around. He was a methodical director, doing multiple takes of his monologues to camera, and was even playing a character on screen, an exaggerated version of himself, trying to come across as the ultimate loner hero to the point where he doesn’t allow his girlfriend on camera to spoil that illusion. I don’t know if he was thinking he would maybe sell this footage and become a world-famous Grizzly Hunter or not, but it’s clear that the camera cemented his purpose there, was his constant companion, and he filmed everything he did, even capturing his own death on film.
We don’t hear the audio of Treadwell and his girlfriend dying, but we get accounts of it from people who have heard it, and it’s clear it is nightmare-inducing stuff that Herzog’s wisely doesn’t exploit. In fact he advises the destruction on tape to the friend that has it.
There’s a point in the film where Herzog simply lets Treadwell’s footage speak for itself, and it is truly majestic, yet knowing what happens to Treadwell makes every shot of him cavorting with his bear "friends" obviously ominously tense. In the end Grizzly Man is a tribute to a naïve and perhaps disturbed man who just wanted to find meaning in his life, even if he had to die to get it, and Treadwell would have been happy his footage found a way out there after all.