Grizzly Man (2005 - Werner Herzog)
Another triumph for Werner Herzog.
Grizzly Man tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent a dozen summers communing with wild grizzly bears in remote stretches of Alaska. The last four of those summers he videotaped hundreds of hours of footage of himself and the animals. At the end of his twelfth year doing this, he was mauled and eaten by one of the grizzlys. For anybody who thinks this is just a big simple "Duh!" or a feature-length edition of the Darwin Awards, you must not know what kind of filmmaker Werner Herzog is.
After last year's wonderful mindbender
Incident at Loch Ness I suppose an audience's first question might be, 'Is this for real?'. Yes, it is. Now that that's out of the way, it's certainly easy to make fun of Treadwell on first glance. Besides the rather obvious insanity of poking bears, his personality was over-the-top. But
Grizzly Man is not out to ridicule the man, nor is it attemping to justify or sanctify his actions. He and his obsession are presented in such an odd and terrific way. Treadwell is many things, often all at once, including earnest, delusional, troubled, manic, humble, vain, devoid of common sense, a crusader for the highest justice, paranoid, understanding, furious, infuriating, a nutball and a genius. Tim had sometimes pretentious ideas of what he was doing, but he definitely took the cause of protecting the animals and their habitat very seriously - sometimes too seriously. He says many times in his self-shot footage that he lives for these creatures and he would willingly die for them too. He was definitely aware of the inherent danger every second he was out there. Herzog does conduct some interviews that let other voices speculate on whether he was a saint or a frippin' moron, but Herzog wisely lets the incredible footage of Treadwell and the bears do most of the talking. The audience is not asked to sympathize with Treadwell, though even if you dislike the man and think he got exactly what he deserved there is a curious kind of understanding that develops in spite of everything.
The story is more complicated than a man who lived with bears being eaten by one. There is stunning footage of these animals, yes, but it's really more of human psychology we learn about. Specifically what drove Tim to that fateful series of adventures, and how what he projected onto the bears and deflected away from human society was what his footage brings to light again and again - whether he intended it to or not. We do experience that pull and intoxication and maybe even magic of the wild, but also witnessing somebody turning desperation and self-pity into something else...something that may not make a whole lot of sense but became Treadwell's destiny.
Herzog also slyly and subtly makes his movie about the power of film itself. Even in moments of artifice and attempted self-mythologization, the unblinking camera captures more than even Treadwell himself could have realized. And in those captured beauties and horrors, the powerr of the medium is the real star.
Grizzly Man is as much about the truth of art as it is any controversy or the motivations of one odd individual. And that, as much as the amazing look at bears and a case study of an unusual character, makes this a must-see.
GRADE: A
*and if anyone is wondering, yes, the camera was indeed running when Timothy Treadwell was killed. But the lens cap was not removed, speaking to the unexpected quickness in which the event must have unfolded, and though the audio portion survived and helped the coroner determine the sequence of events, we do not hear it in the film. We do watch as Herzog himself listens to it in headphones, his back to the camera, and it is still gut-wrenching.
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my friend hated it. 
