Film Reviews
By Nathaniel Bell

Grisly Story

The synopsis of Werner Herzog's riveting new documentary “Grizzly Man” sounds like a sick joke: Nature-loving eco-sentimentalist and amateur filmmaker Timothy Treadwell, while living among the grizzly bears of northern Alaska, is killed and eaten by the very animals he swore to protect. But Herzog's fascinating, multi-layered depiction of an emotionally unbalanced individual reaches deeper than its premise would suggest. It ripens into an unforgettable portrait of middle-aged loneliness and a provocative rumination on the vast chasm between man and nature.

In 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were found dead and partially devoured in one of the loneliest corners of Katmai National Park and Preserve. It didn't take long for city officials to realize that the culprit was one of the bears Treadwell had been filming for a homemade documentary. Unlike many who visit the far reaches of the Alaskan wilderness, Treadwell was not just another tourist in search of a thrill, but an experienced adventurer who had spent thirteen summers camping in the wild, photographing his subjects at close range.

Piecing together over a hundred hours of digital video that Treadwell left behind, German filmmaker Werner Herzog, one of the most visionary of contemporary filmmakers as well as one of the most pessimistic, reconstructs the events leading up to Treadwell's untimely death. In a fascinating forensic style that will no doubt excite fans of postmortem investigative thrillers, Herzog (who also narrates the film in his trademark lyrical fashion) interviews medical examiners, state park officials, and several of the dead man's close friends to determine the root of Treadwell's demise. Herzog's masterstroke, however, is his ability to manipulate our feelings about Treadwell and his plight.

With his blonde hair combed down into a Prince Valiant haircut, surfer's shades that hide a pair of anxious eyes, and a squeaky falsetto voice that occasionally issues strings of expletives, Timothy Treadwell is at first an ingratiating presence, then clownish, pathetic, and finally tragic. Some audience members will feel his brutal death was entirely justified. Others will view him as a sympathetic victim of circumstance. But almost everyone will agree that he was desperately lonely, and this loneliness fueled his obsession.

Treadwell's strange story is in perfect sync with Herzog's worldview. Like Treadwell, Herzog spent years in the wildernesses of the world, shooting films (“Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo”) about dreamers whose genius and madness crisscrossed and became indistinguishable. But where Treadwell believed that the world is in harmony, Herzog believes it to be governed by chaos, hostility, and murder. Treadwell's death is merely a logical extension of this belief.

Aside from some crafty showmanship (the director stages a scene in which he listens on headphones to the audio tape containing the sounds of Treadwell being devoured, denying the audience the satisfaction of hearing it), Herzog plays fair with the volatile subject matter, never making Treadwell the target of easy ridicule. During the film's elegiac ending, one can almost hear Treadwell's earlier, eerily prophetic declaration as if from beyond the grave: “I will die for these animals.”

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