OK, it's not
that much of an older release, but I was talking to someone recently who had plowed through seemingly all of this year's top-shelf documentaries, and yet somehow had missed Werner Herzog's superb
Grizzly Man, from 2005. Ergo, this re-up, originally published as part of a year-in-film retrospective for
Now Playing Magazine on December 23, 2005:
Man,
nature and the beguiling grey area in between get a workout in Werner
Herzog’s mesmerizing, strangely affecting documentary Grizzly Man, which focuses on the unusual life and violent death of a self-styled grizzly bear expert and amateur preservationist.
A
college washout and alcoholic would-be actor who in his 30s gave up
marijuana and drink cold turkey and reinvented himself with a Prince
Valiant bob and phony Australian accent (the latter eventually giving
way to a high-pitched, slightly effeminate surfer patois of indistinct
region), Timothy Treadwell lived unarmed in the Alaskan wilderness
among bears for 13 summers, and filmed his adventures in the wild
during his final five seasons. With himself as the central character,
Treadwell crafted strange, idiosyncratic narratives of high confession.
He would live alone for weeks and sometimes months, staging and
engaging in therapeutic soliloquies, rants and imagined conversations
with his animal “friends.” There’s a pained, natural beauty to this odd
and startling footage — from which Herzog chiefly carves his narrative,
along with fantastic music of accompaniment from Richard Thompson.
Enigmatic, alluring, personable and infuriating in equal parts,
Treadwell fancied himself a fuzzy, New Age professional “protector” of
wildlife. It was in October 2003, though, that Treadwell’s mutilated
remains, along with those of his on-again/off-again, quasi-girlfriend
Amie Huguenard, would be discovered near their campsite in Alaska’s
Katmai National Park and Reserve. The pair had been mauled and devoured
by a grizzly (and the attack audio-recorded), perhaps one of the very
bears Treadwell so lovingly photographed.
Grizzly Man isn’t exacting as a biography of Treadwell (we
don’t meet his parents and get a glimpse of his formative years until
an hour into the affair, and the movie takes at face value the urban
legend — seemingly testable — that Treadwell finished runner-up to
Woody Harrelson for the role of Woody Boyd on Cheers), but that
will come neither as a surprise to Herzog fans nor an irritation to
those new to the director. In true Herzogian fashion, Grizzly Man
offers up not only ruminations on the mysteries of the wild that the
title and subject matter augur (in one ferocious fight, a bear even
releases his bowels), and its relationship to an Earth that is no
longer its domain, but also separate and distinct mysteries of human
nature — what drove the flaky and yet heartbreakingly approachable
Treadwell, for instance, and who was Huguenard, briefly glimpsed only
once on tape?
Herzog “investigates” these questions only to the degree to which it
interests his thesis that the world is a place of sustained disarray
and unhappiness in which only untenable respite can be achieved. He
also draws parallels — chaos, disorder and murder — between Grizzly Man and his own work, including the famously deranged production of Fitzcarraldo, and includes interviews with Treadwell’s pilot friend and the examining coroner, the latter of which may or may not be staged.
Grizzly Man seems, I know, too small and exclusive to be
anything more than an ornamental pleasure, a cinematic postcard for a
few. But in its concluding moments, as Treadwell works himself up into
a sputtering, incandescent rage in an amazing, self-pitying and
paranoia-tinged rant against the national park service,
you glimpse a
stranger in modern society, this world of asphalt and glass — and in
its basest, most distilled form, a piece of the innate humanity in all
of us.
Grizzly Man is a portrait of a cracked American original, but this one man’s brokenness proves oddly and profoundly moving.
(Lions Gate, R, 103 mins.) 
