Feb 21

Feb 21 Classic Movie Review : Grizzly Man (2005)

Grizzly Man is the Werner Herzog movie everyone knows and love. Even people who don't know who Werner Herzog is. As the legendary contrarian that I am, it's the one movie from him that I hadn't seen yet. Not because it’s the movie that everyone else loved, though. I thought it was a nature documentary about some bear expert that got eaten by a bear and I don’t like nature documentaries. But Grizzly Man is about a strange bear non expert who got eaten by a bear because he thought he was one.

Somehow, he really seemed to have triggered the old man too.

So yeah, Grizzly Man tells the story of Timothy Treadwell’s death. He was a self-professed protector of grizzly bears who spent his summers on Kodiak Island in Alaska just chilling with his four legged homies, really. From what I could gather in the documentary, he didn’t really do anything other than hang around. He ran an organization that educated people about grizzly bear and (I think) raised funding, but that’s it. The grizzlies in Alaska at the tme of the documentary didn’t really need protection.

The Inner Romance and the Clinical Gaze

What makes Grizzly Man such a riveting movie is Werner Herzog’s complete absence of objectivity regarding his topic, even if he consistently remains outside of the narrative Timothy Treadwell created for himself. Even if he is openly appalled by the consequences of Treadwell’s obsession with bears, Herzog sees him for who he is: a man who found his own private eden among wild creatures and got increasingly more pissed at his fellow human being for moving onto his sandbox.

So, Herzog is not trying to tell Treadwell’s story, but rather the story of the ontological mistake that ended up costing him his life. His belief that nature was inherently good and nurturing to whoever respected it. That he was fostering an unspoken bond with wild beasts just by virtue of hanging out with them and not getting eaten. There’s an inherent tension between Treadwell’s beliefs and Herzog’s point of view that he sometimes breaks by making one of his fun, nihilistic claims such as this one.

That’s what so fun about this movie. Werner Herzog's observations of Timothy Treadwell are clinical, but not always reasonable. It's about conflicting points of view, but it's narrated from the point of view of someone who’s already been proven right by default. Herzog is being judgemental, but the entire point of Grizzly Man is for that judgement to be based on the most accurate information possible. It’s a very German thing to do. If you have a German people in your life, you know what I mean.

Werner Herzog's cold, dead heart

I know it sounds harash, but Grizzly Man is not a nihilistic movie. At least not quite. There are scenes with great heart, most notably one where Werner Herzog offers you a glimpse at his cold, dead heart that is still beating somehow. He somehow listens to the audio taping of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard’s death (because Treadwell was taping everything) and the purpose of Grizzly Man becomes a little clearer right there and then: showing what it means to turn your back on fellow humans.

At heart, Timothy Treadwell was a heartbroken man who moved further and further away from the modern world as he felt rejected over and over again for being who he is. First for (most likely) being gay by his parents and then for not getting the Woody Harrelson part in Cheers. At the end, the acceptance of his fellow environmentalists was not even enough. Treadwell required the mystical silence of bears, which he perceived as total acceptance and not indifference like Herzog claimed.

Grizzly Man is the story of a man who believed to have found balance among wild creatures and found his demise (and was responsible for the demise of his girlfriend) pushing this relationship beyond its natural boundaries. It’s a great example of the paradox of men obsession with their own natural state even if they’re inherently removed from nature. It’s quite funny at times, but it’s also tragic and moving and flabbergasting too. It deserves to be remembers as the modern classic that it is.