Rating: 4 out of 5
The films of Werner Herzog are less like scripted works and more like inherent studies of people. Peculiar people, often social oddities of sorts, but given a very round representation in his films. Even his works of fiction feel unplanned, as if the events had really transpired and there just happened to be a camera turned on and pointed in the right direction. A majority of his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man he did not even film himself. He sifted through and pasted together clips from over 100 hours of footage taken by Timothy Treadwell, a self-proclaimed bear expert and activist who fit into Herzog's catalog of eccentrics as well as any ficitonal character.
I use "fit" in the past tense, because Treadwell was mauled and eaten by one of his furred friends in October of 2003, along with his bear-weary girlfriend Amie Huguenard. It is widely accepted that his death was his own fault for being unprepared (he refused to carry even non-lethal bear protection), but Treadwell's story is not one to be forgotten. Every year since 1990, he would spend several months at a time isolated in Southwest Alaska's Katmai National Park, living among the bears and averting conflict time after time. In the winter, he lived out of Malibu and would give presentaitons on bears to elementary classes free of charge. With his close friend Jewel Palovak, he founded the organization Grizzly People, dedicated to preserving grizzly bears. Though he was sociable enough, Treadwell believed Katmai was where he belonged, and he felt an emotional connection to the bears that he never felt towards another human being.
Grizzly Man in an exercise in careful and purposeful editing. Herzog and his team craft a captivating and humanly ambivalent portrayal of Treadwell by using his own tapes of himself. They are, of course, the most reliable source for understanding how he was out in the wilderness. To briefly describe his personality: self-confident, protective, sensitive, enduring, and (most surprisingly, to those who have read Nick Jans' sub-par biography The Grizzly Maze) very flamboyant. There are scenes of Treadwell weeping over what he considers maltreatment of the animals, and scenes of him lapsing into coarse rants about poachers and the park service. If Herzog ever puts a slant on a scene, he makes sure to slant the other way in another scene to even it out. Many of Treadwell's discourses about bear behavior can be viewed two ways: inspirational, or absurd. Either way, they are fascinating to watch.
Where the film gets awkward is in the intermingled scenes of Herzog interviewing people who knew Treadwell, from Willy Fulton, the bush pilot who discovered Tim and Amie's remains, to Jewel Palovak, Treadwell's charismatic but anguished Grizzly People co-founder. Maybe it was just the shock of actually seeing and hearing Herzog (as far as anonymity goes, he's always sort of been the Unabomber of filmmaking), but it seems that these interviews start off interesting and wind down to mere interruptions to Treadwell's videos. There is one, however, that is unexpectedly and effectively odd: the coroner's report, which proves more powerful than just a reenactment.
The film is scored with archetypal nature video acoustic guitars, but here they serve a more important purpose than usual. They help explain Treadwell the way Herzog seems to view him: as a child. A kid in a 40-year-old's body, in a perpetual state of wild imagination, seeing the world as a huge and beautiful place for him to explore. The innocence is venerable, but his ignorance of the harsh laws of nature is what led to the death of both himself and Amie Huguenard.
Speaking of Amie, she is never seen in any of Treadwell's footage. Over his thirteen years in Alaska, he actually brought many female companions with him, but they were rarely seen on camera. More often, he is seen accompanied by a family of mischievous red foxes. That's how Treadwell was; happiest to just play with the animals.
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