Grizzly Man (2005) - Documentary

Tragicomedy is an overworked word. Yet nothing else will do. Werner Herzog, that connoisseur of extreme figures in far-off places, has made an inspired documentary about the gonzo naturalist Timothy Treadwell, who in 2003 ended up as lunch for the bears he lived with in the remote Alaskan wilderness.
It is poignant, it is beautiful, and it is absolutely hilarious. Herzog didn't even have much work to do, what's more, because Treadwell - gifted, untrained film-maker that he was - had done almost everything himself, leaving behind hundreds of hours of videotape that he had shot at extreme and indeed fatal risk to himself. They contain sublime, dramatic shots of the bears and footage of his own mad and posturing rants to camera, wearing combats and a bandana - part surfer-dude, part drama-queen. Poor Mr Treadwell. He loved those bears. And they loved him. Yum, yum!

Timothy Treadwell was a mixed-up kid from Long Island in the US who wanted to be an actor. He auditioned for Cheers, but the shock and disappointment of coming second to Woody Harrelson sent him over the edge into drink and drug crises. He came out the other side clean and sober, but with a new passion: the grizzly bears of Alaska. Every summer, he went camping out there with his video camera and his attitude problem, regularly breaking the US park rangers' rule not to come within 100 yards of a bear. Timothy got up close and personal, giving them cute names like "Mr Chocolate" and "Sgt Brown", patting them on the nose, and becoming obsessed with gaining the bears' respect for his courage in doing so. His opening rant to camera is a comic classic, influenced, I very much suspect, by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now: "I am a kind warrior! I will not die at their claws and paws! I will be a master!"

Bizarrely, his macho extreme-sports persona often alternates with something screamingly camp. Treadwell yoo-hoos wildly like Robin Williams at the bears who lope up to him: "Oh hi! Hiya! Oh he's a big bear! He's a surly bear!" And Treadwell is often very funny - a reality TV natural who never got his own show. There are too many choice moments to describe here, but among the classics is his sudden zooming-in on an immobile bumble bee on a flower, which he tearfully describes: "Isn't this so sad? A bumble-bee expired while it was doing the pollen thing. It's beautiful . . . it's sad . . . it's tragic . . . it's . . . WAIT! The bee just MOVED! Is it . . . is it just SLEEPING?" Later, Treadwell films a full-on macho-bear fight between Micky and Sgt Brown over a female called Saturn, whom Treadwell describes as the "Michelle Pfeiffer of bears".

His mission was to teach the world about these animals, and this he certainly did, according to his lights, touring schools and giving illustrated talks to kids without accepting a fee. But he also angrily claimed, in some of his looniest soliloquies, that he was "protecting" the bears from poachers or even the federal authorities. The awful truth was that he did not add anything to our knowledge of bears, and that any supposed danger these animals were in, living as they did in a protected national park, existed only in Treadwell's over-heated, self-dramatising imagination.

Treadwell's over-the-top persona is in contrast to the cool, deadpan drone of Herzog himself, who pays tribute to his intuitive skills as a film-maker, but repudiates Treadwell's Disneyfied view of nature, seeing in it only colossal coldness and indifference. Herzog appears on camera just once, listening through headphones to Treadwell's final screams - and those of his luckless girlfriend - as they are both eaten. It is only audio, as Treadwell was attacked before he could remove the lens-cap; in a masterstroke of restraint, Herzog does not let us hear this sound, and sorrowfully advises Treadwell's former girlfriend, Jewel, to burn the tape. I wonder if she has.

Was Timothy Treadwell an inspired radical operating outside the academic naturalist establishment - or a pain in the neck with personal issues? A little of both, of course. He was certainly a brilliant performer and director who, by crossing the taboo line (by as it were impaling himself on the taboo line's barbed wire) vividly demonstrated the alien-ness of nature, and therefore its strange and terrible beauty, more than anything I've ever seen by David Attenborough. It is a superb documentary, because Treadwell has not been coerced or set up; he was enough of an amateur to be relaxed and unselfconscious, yet enough of a professional to generate all this outstanding footage, and quite rightly Herzog declines to patronise or make fun of him. If we didn't already know Timothy Treadwell's awful fate, it would be enough to say: a star is born.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2006/feb/03/1