Grizzly Man
(dir. Werner Herzog)
Could failing to get the part of Woody on Cheers really drive a man to turn his back on being human? This is one of the more bizarre questions that Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man poses in its troubled margins. The documentary tells the tale of a failed actor, Timothy Treadwell, who spent many summers living among grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness. Holed up in a worryingly basic tent, Treadwell filmed many hours of himself in his self-appointed role of guardian of the bears, and Herzog has used that footage as the foundation of his own take on events. To describe Treadwell as the guardian of the bears is, in fact, not strictly accurate, for it soon emerges that he actually saw himself as one of the bears, no longer human. There are, accordingly, some truly astonishing scenes in which he is face to face with the creatures, and some even more bewildering moments at which he even loses his temper with them and tells them to back off, which they do. From a very early point in the film, though, we know that Treadwell eventually dies in his tent, along with his girlfriend, at the hands of a bear. Even though there is an audio recording of the fatal attack (it would appear that Treadwell didn't have time to remove the lens cap), Herzog decides, in a moving scene, not to include it in his film. And this is very much a documentary that is more interested in opening than closing a case. Herzog is absolutely clear in his narration about where he disagrees with Treadwell - he says, for instance, in an unintentionally hilarious moment that, unlike Timothy, he believes that the universe is nothing but chaos and bleakness - and he poses some uncomfortable questions about Treadwell's disavowal of the human and, above all, his staged self-mythologizing. (It would seem, for instance, that some of the footage was shot deliberately to give the impression that Timothy was always alone in the wilderness, even though he was regularly accompanied.) There are also many moments at which the interviews conducted by Herzog feel curiously contrived. The coroner who reports on the aftermath of the attack, for example, delivers a dramatic monologue to camera that feels (but might not be) meticulously scripted and over-rehearsed. That's not a criticism of Herzog's film, though; it's merely one of the elements that gives Grizzly Man its claws.
28th Feb 2006 - Tumblr
5