Grizzly Man (2005)

Grizzly Man, by Griz Bear Man

I feel kind of odd reviewing a movie so close to my nom de plume (Griz Bear Man--no, my real name is NOT Doug Peacock, either, so don't get any ideas, especially since he can write whereas I cannot write worth a crap). I feel odd, especially since I get out in the wilderness where the grizzly roams and occasionally see one.

Werner Herzog does one hell of a job of documentary film making, portraying the controversial, somewhat mentally unbalanced but still inspiring, troubling figure of Timothy Treadwell, a man I've personally met and liked. And Herzog does so convincingly and with real depth. Like Treadwell, I am a ferocious advocate of protecting grizzlies and their habitat; unlike him, I don't consider grizzlies my friends--I know they hate me and have good reason to hate me and will kill me if I don't behave myself in their country. Grizzlies teach me respect, and teach us humans some boundaries that we just don't cross, which is why I want to keep grizzlies around--to keep us in our place.

Unfortunately, Mr. Treadwell did not repsect these boundaries, which Mr. Herzog takes pains to point out. Yet Herzog strikes as much of a balance as a film-maker can with such a mercurial subject, showing Treadwell to be a nut case, but also a man Herzog admires for how he exemplifies the human search for meaning and, moreover, found what he was looking for--even if he paid a stiff price for that. Herzog makes deft use of Treadwell's own footage to flesh out his portrait of this complicated man--we see that Treadwell did have an ability to somehow get bears to learn to trust him and tolerate his close proximity (in one scene a curious cub comes right up to Treadwell, who gently tells the cub to go away and "go play" but the mother does not seem agitated, only watchful).

Herzog also leaves us thinking harder about the proper human relationship with the natural world. Now, I don't like some of Herzog's attitudes--he brings his German superiority-of-culture sensibility to the film , which comes out when he makes the statement that, in contrast to Treadwell who saw an Edenic beauty and harmony in nature, Herzog sees chaos and brute indifference with the further implication being that civilization represents order. Poppycock! Civilization, especially modern industrial civilization, is on the verge of plunging the whole world into chaos, especially ecological chaos--civilization's only hope is to acknowledge its roots in the natural world. Herzog then later reinforces his poppycock attitude by criticizing Treadwell for his hostility to civilization. Well, Treadwell is sometimes way over the top (witness his profanity-laced diatribe against the Park Service in the film), but he may have good reason for being one of civilization's discontents, given the threat civilization poses to grizzlies in particular, and global ecological integrity in general. In this, Herzog may be as naive in his own way as Treadwell is in his. In short, Herzog does not get it, especially when it comes to wilderness or bears--he seems to think bears are unfeeling brutes intrested only in food, even as he acknowledges their beauty and grace. But I will not let these shortcomings detract from a superlative documentary film. Treadwell pushed the envelope maybe too far in trying to get the rest of humanity to regain their lost relationship with wild nature in a civilization that is in many ways deliberately hostile to the natural world and has alienated humans from their own nature as well as from the natural world. To his credit, Herzog allows the viewer to see this and to see that we would be well-advised not to love bears the way Timothy did, or we'll end up dead and deservedly so, but we ARE well advised to love and accept bears for what they are and leave them well-enough alone to live wild, to live free.