GRIZZLY MAN

US, 2005, 103 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Werner Herzog.

After watching this documentary, I was surprised to see how enthusiastic quotes on the advertising and in the press notes emphasised its impact as a nature documentary. Yes, there are many extraordinary scenes and some unique footage of grizzly bears captured in the Alaskan national parks and audiences who enjoy this kind of film or television program (especially on the Discovery Channel which has co-produced Grizzly Man).

But, audiences may well leave the cinema with quite a different impression. The Grizzly Man is Timothy Treadwell, an American who spent thirteen summers with the grizzlies, who saw himself as their protector against poachers and negligent authorities, who toured schools and became a media celebrity informing the public about the bears.

Director Werner Herzog is one of the great mavericks of cinema. For more than forty years he has made a succession of fictions and documentaries that explore eccentricity, ego, obsessions and madness. Often with a rough and ready style, he has made his audiences look quite differently at the world and people on the margin. So, it is no surprise to find him intrigued by the life and death of Timothy Treadwell.

Herzog does a constant voiceover commentary, investing himself and his perspective in the film and the portrait of Treadwell. What Herzog does is to lead us on a journey, observing and sharing Treadwell’s disintegration of personality. With footage from his many videos, with comments from friends and critics, Herzog empathises at first with Treadwell, then moves to a critique of his work and self-imposed mission. We discover a former alcoholic who took drugs, who invented an Australian background for himself (he was from Long Island) who broke the regulations about keeping distance from the grizzlies, who expressed his rage against civilisation with more and more disturbing intensity and exhibited traits of self-agrandisement and delusions of grandeur.

We know from the outset that Timothy Treadwell and his companions were killed by a grizzle, so we are aware that we are contemplating a finished life and its meaning. His friends are loyal. Critics say that he did not understand how he could be altering the bears’ attitudes towards humans, that he personalised them in a way that did not correspond to their animal and hunting realities.

Herzog himself has shown some of these traits in his films: the megalomaniacs in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo and the documentary about his stormy relationship with the star of these films, the manic Klaus Kinski, in My Special Fiend. Grizzly Man is a nature film, but it is also a psychiatric case-study.