Werner Herzog: Grizzly Man (2005)
Werner Herzog: Grizzly Man (2005)
An important lesson about man and nature
Review by Chris Knipp
For thirteen years "grizzly man" Timothy Treadwell went to an Alaskan wildlife refuge on Kodiak Island and pitched his tent alone -- and the last couple of times with a girlfriend (Amy Huguenard) -- spending the summers among huge grizzly bears. The rest of the year he went to schools and "free of charge" showed his films of the bears and his exploits. When the last of his summers drew to a close he and his girlfriend died among the grizzlies as he'd always known -- and even David Letterman had pointed out -- that he might. Filmmaker Werner Herzog, longtime student of crazy eccentric loners on heroic doomed quests, has taken on Treadwell's life and personality as the subject of a rare and powerful documentary.
At the heart of Grizzly Man are Herzog's selective cullings from film Treadwell left behind chronicling both the bears and -- with poignancy and openness -- his own demons, passions, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. Herzog has added interviews with women in Treadwell's life, with his parents, with the pilot who took him to and from his campgrounds and later found his and his girlfriend's remains, and with Franc Fallico, the unusually sympathetic and sensitive -- and perhaps a bit looney -- coroner who examined these. The director has bound it all together with his own frank and idiosyncratic narration. The result is a rare sober look at the more delusional aspects of man's relations to wild animals.
At times Herzog by implication sympathetically links Treadwell with his former principle star and sparring partner, the late mad eccentric actor Klaus Kinski. Like Kinski Treadwell had tantrums on a film set. But his set was the outdoors and there was no director to spar with; his sparring partners were nature and his own troubled psyche. Nature contained, of course, living witnesses, chief among them the grizzly bears he knows can kill him. He repeatedly tells the camera how much he loves them. He loves the gentler, smaller foxes near whose dens he pitches his tents during the second halves of his summer sojourns. He tells the camera you must be firm with the bears, and he says he knows how to handle them, even though he also repeatedly says he knows he may die there.
He is a gambler. Is he a complex man, or merely a confused one? Is he brave, or just foolhardy? What is his purpose in spending all this time among the grizzlies? Is he gathering information, or taking refuge among creatures he need not please, only keep a safe distance from (though he continually comes closer to bears than the park rules and good sense require)? He has a soft sissified manner and voice and even says he wishes he were gay. But he also rants and rages embarrassingly and tiresomely against unseen enemies, poachers, sightseers, rangers, hunters, park officials, the whole urban settled world he runs from to this world he idealizes and blindly sees as perfect.
As Herzog notes, Treadwell sought to disregard nature's cruelty, and any time it was in his face -- as when the bears were starving in a dry spell and began eating their own young -- he sought to manipulate nature to eliminate the ugliness. He faulted not the bears but the rain gods. Then when his atheist's prayers are answered and torrential rains do in fact come, Treadwell is comic -- not for the first time -- trapped for days in his collapsed tent.
Young Timothy according to his parents was an ordinary boy who loved animals from childhood and got a diving scholarship to college. But he injured his back and quit college and he drank and when he went to LA to act and didn't get a part on Cheers he "spiraled down." He never had a lasting relationship with a woman and the drinking became serious and constant. In vain he tried programs, meetings, self-discipline -- but the drinking went on and was killing him. Finally he got sober for the grizzlies and the foxes. He decided to devote his life to them and he pledged to them that he would be clean and healthy. It was a miracle. Yet he remained not only manic-depressive but passive-aggressive, as his constant on-camera alternations between gentle declarations of love of the animals and his spewing of vitriol against the civilized world attest.
Treadwell's soft-voiced declarations of love and sweetness among the grizzlies would be beautiful -- if such behavior, in a world of extreme physical risk, surrounded by limber lumbering beasts with great teeth and long claws, while preening for the camera with caps and bandanas and golden locks in a dozen alternate takes -- were not criminally silly and irresponsible. Herzog hides none of this in his portrait, which is both sympathetic and ruthless.
As the years passed the Grizzly Man found transitions back to civilization harder and harder to make. On the last occasion, an airport official infuriated him by questioning the validity of his ticket and he turned around with his girlfriend -- who was afraid of bears! -- and returned to the "maze," the most dangerous of his summer campgrounds because it wasn't in the open where the bears could see him and steer clear but among their burrows and the brush. It was later than he ever stayed and the bears he knew and had names for were hibernating now, replaced by new unknown and more hostile and nasty animals. He must also have been more desperate, perhaps more careless? We see the bear that probably devoured him and poor Amy.
Herzog has access to everything, even an audio-only tape of Timothy and Amy's truly grizzly death. He spares us, though. He didn't want to make a snuff film.
As Herzog begins his film by stating, Timothy Treadwell crossed a line between wild animal and human that should never be crossed. It's a line many touchy-feely "nature" and "wildlife" films also cross: see the recent March of the Penguins and you'll have a prime example. Grizzly Man isn't meant to be about grizzlies. It's about men who cross that line -- who willfully misunderstand nature for their own misguided reasons, to serve their own dysfunctional needs. A depressing but important film.
Posted on Chris Knippwebsite.
The Mysterious Man of the Jungle
Man attempting to surmount nature, and failing miserably, has long been an obsession of German filmmaker/documentarian Werner Herzog -- his work during the 70's most ardently dealt with that. In his latest effort, Grizzly Man, Herzog has found a way to retread the concept through Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent 13 summers in the Alaskan nature preserve, often breaking laws in order to get closer to the grizzly bears he apparently cared for. The documentary consists of excerpts from the over 100 hours of footage Treadwell mostly shot himself over the course of 5 summers before him and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed by one of the bears in October, 2003. (I won’t get into other details since Chris has done a good job above.)
Early on in the film, it’s hard not to sympathize with Treadwell and his passion, but slowly and surely, it becomes apparent that he wanted recognition (not fame, necessarily). It’s obvious to me that his accomplishment led him to believe that he’s superior to other humans in a way ("You won’t fucking survive here like I did," he once says looking directly into the camera), something he always aimed for, rather than it allowed him to strive to "become a bear," which is what we hear from various "professionals."
Having said that, we need to be careful regarding making an ultimate judgment. After all, Herzog has given us only a few minutes of, as I mentioned earlier, over 100 hours of footage. What we watched fitted well with Herzog’s overall agenda. It’s quite possible that if another documentarian would’ve taken on the subject, we’d be discussing something different. Still, in this doc, which is overall well put together, Herzog’s should’ve dug deeper into Treadwell’s contentious relationship with Huguenard, which we discovered through his diary entries. The bear who killed them (and then later got shot) was provided more attention than the girl.
And Herzog’s penchant for details of their gory deaths was primarily incorporated in order to go around what he didn’t wanted to do: let us hear the audio tape. I have mixed feeling on that. Is it more "noble" to have an overly excited forensic-embalmer(?) explain how the bear tore into Treadwell’s skull, or would Herzog have been able to make his obvious point by employing an artistic means? I recall Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s mastery of sound editing in the anthology titled 11'09''01 - September 11 (2002) in which his segment simply consisted of screams of people jumping from the buildings after the attack. It was a moving and devastating account and not simply a technical showcase. But if Herzog was going to stay away from the sounds, then he shouldn’t have tried to recreate a scene where he listens to the tape and then informs Treadwell’s former girlfriend to throw it away. It teases us more than anything else. Not good.
However, what follows is the film’s most astonishing and, to some, possibly disturbing scene: Two bears fight it out for the "Michelle Pfeiffer of bears," as Treadwell later notes. Herzog rightfully remains quiet during the sequence, which culminates with his protagonist recognizing the laws of nature while sitting not far away for the fallen bear. This is where Treadwell feels like a human being, one who’s brave enough to be right there. (He also spoke about the possibility of his death on numerous occasions; practically he knew that his end would be through the animals he loved most.)
The filmmaker’s best moments, however, do comprise of his commentary, at times running along Treadwell’s. Herzog doesn’t allow us to make a connection between his subject here and his "favorite" actor Klaus Kinski -- he makes it himself: "[Treadwell]’s rage is almost incandescent, artistic. The actor in his film has taken over from the filmmaker. I have seen this madness before on the film set." This was after Treadwell’s profanity-laden rant against the Alaskan park services. (The disappointing part is that the bears were doing perfectly fine. There are many, many other species out there that could’ve used him.) And then later on, it’s Treadwell who provides him with the close-up of a bear’s face, making Herzog conclude that "in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature."
Nature is cruel. Most of us recognize that, I think. But it’s also beautiful and majestic. While the focus here is certainly on the former, Herzog duly notes that Treadwell’s images, unwittingly, often consisted of the lush green hills and valleys in the region, not to mention the rivers and the lakes that surrounded them. But ultimately the filmmaker believes that the common denominator here is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder. Looking at the direction we seem to be headed in, he just might be right.
Grizzly Man - Grade: B
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*The doc is currently in theaters. It will available on DVD on Dec 27th.
Grizzly Man (2005)- My review
GRIZZLY MAN
Directed by Werner Herzog (2005)
In 100 years of keeping records in Alaska, less than 12 people have been killed by grizzly bears, according to German director Werner Herzog. Herzog's film Grizzly Man documents two of them, the first known bear killings in Alaska's 4.7 million-acre Katmai National Park. In October 2003, the bodies of environmentalist Timothy Treadwell and his friend Amie Huguenard were found near Kaflia Bay when a pilot arrived to pick them up and take them to Kodiak Island. A starving thousand-pound, 28-year-old male grizzly, unknown to the area had mauled Treadwell and Huguenard to death. The film tells the story of the self-styled protector of bears and co-author of the book "Among Grizzlies: Living With Wild Bears in Alaska."
Treadwell spent more than a dozen summers living with bears in the area he called the Grizzly Maze and videotaped over 100 hours of footage during the last five years. Complemented by narration from Herzog, Treadwell tells his own story in front of the camera. He was an aspiring actor who dealt with drug and alcohol problems in California before he moved to Alaska in the summer of 1989. It is unclear how much of his determination to live among the bears resulted from his love of nature or from his need to escape his problems at home. In any event, he became a friend to the bears and developed a brash confidence around them, giving them names such as Mr. Chocolate, the Grinch and Sgt. Brown, and often getting so close he could touch them. Though the image of Treadwell is of being reckless and foolhardy, according to John Rogers, owner of Coastal Bear Tours who knew him, "his (Treadwell's) knowledge and understanding of bears was equal to the experience of any commercial bear viewing guide or bear specialist in Katmai National Park, better than most".
Far from being delusional or failing to deal appropriately with nature and recognize its dangers, Rogers says, "he was not one to blithely walk up to a bear, he was cautious, even fearful, around bears he didn’t know, but he developed relationships and mutual trust with a few individual bears over the years". Though the film raises complex questions that do not lend themselves to easy answers, it has nonetheless been seized upon by the corporate media to denounce environmentalists and those who dare to live on the edge of society. Treadwell has been called a nut, a certified madman, foolish, obsessive, an egomaniac, bipolar, paranoid and schizophrenic. While his on-camera behavior is often bizarre and at times repugnant, we don't know how much this represents who Treadwell really was or even whether Mr. Herzog selected particular footage to produce a desired effect.
Bizarre or not, the fact remains that Timothy did what he said. He lived in open and honest communication with wild animals for thirteen long years, a feat that required mental and physical toughness, endurance, and commitment. In the process, he educated thousands of children by speaking in schools without compensation, and founded "Grizzly People", an organization devoted to preserving bears and their wilderness habitat. Though he does express admiration for his filmmaking ability, Herzog makes clear his antipathy to much of what Treadwell stands for. He refers to environmental activists as "tree huggers" and sees nature as "chaotic, hostile, and murderous". Treadwell's nature photography is beautiful, showing things that we may have never seen before, particularly a fight between two huge bears, yet Herzog cannot resist getting in a dig at unions with his remark that his footage is something "studio directors with their union crews could never dream of".
Grizzly Man, under Herzog's direction, veers toward the sensational. In one sequence Treadwell demonstrates the emotional maturity of an eleven-year old in an expletive-laden rant against the Park Service, but the sequence has no timeframe and no context. Herzog also criticizes Treadwell's celebrity status, describing him as "a star by virtue of his own invention." (He had appeared on David Letterman's Late Show, the Discovery Channel's Discovery Sunday, and other television programs.) Although interviews with people who knew Treadwell appear to be balanced, some of them seem staged for melodramatic effect. Herzog films Timothy's parents awkwardly clinging to Treadwell's childhood Teddy bear and we watch as he presents Timothy's still ticking watch to a former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak in a bizarre sequence that feels contrived. In another scene that can only be described as maudlin, the director listens to the audio tape of the bear attack (pretending to hear it for the first time) and cautions Jewel never to listen to it, yet at the same time titillating us with its contents.
Many critics have called Treadwell delusional for thinking he was protecting the bears. Yet perhaps the most telling fact is that during his time in Katmai, no bear was known to have been killed by poachers. In the first year after his death, five bears were poached. According to leading Alaskan conservationist and filmmaker Joel Bennett, "The recent poaching of bears in Katmai National Park shows that Alaskans should never be complacent about the protection of their treasured wildlife resources. Tim Treadwell's vigilance may well have saved other bears from the same fate." Was Treadwell a friend of the bears or their worst enemy? Was he a man that only wanted to share his observations that grizzlies are not the ferocious beasts we have always thought them to be, or a sick egotist, obsessed with his own demons? It is hard to tell from this film. Perhaps the answer is a little bit of both. Though I am grateful to Herzog for exposing Treadwell's work to a wider public, I am unclear as to whether Grizzly Man celebrates his life or exploits it. "For now", in the words of friend Louisa Wilcox, "it is enough to honor the dead and celebrate a rare life, and the places and creatures he brought into ours."
GRADE: ?
