Grizzly Man
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Movie Reviews of Grizzly Man
Movie Review: Noncomittal.... Noninvasive in any way. - Alaskan Samuri Swordsman, aka defiant defender
Summary: 5 Stars
For starters, if you try to type what I'm about to type, you will laugh! You will laugh here.....and there! A forewarning: One must, must, must not misinterpret my words as being informative in any fashion. Instead, they coagulate rather gruesomely, convening as a compendium on Timmothy "he who Bears the Mark of the Bear" Treadwell. If I should say anything, let it be this much: this film is roaringly genius!
Let us begin, and where that shall be from, this is a paradox for the ages.....18 and above. You see, I witnessed before my very eye(s) the ugly truth brought to film format by a one Mr. Werner Herzog, director and film maker from above. Literally, the guys a registered connosieur of astounding acquity and veracity unmatched since the days of Jim Henson and his mudslinging muppets - damn rabble rousers made 'O Arts N Crafts specially formulated materials. But I digress. Regress. And digress again.
Reexamining this blog's premise, the 2005 movie (theatrical release?) Grizzly Man documents, via director Herzog culling and compiling 100+ hours of Timothy Treadwell's Alaskan hiatus' over the course of 13 summers (1990-2003), Treadwell's highs and lows, personal struggles against demons resurfacing in morphed form, family dilemmas be they overcome or latent horror - all is laid bare, but at face-value? Not necessarily. Rather, Timothy Treadwell - or Grizzly Man a la glamorous big screen gala title - and his battles against nature, ironically waging them in the hope of protecting her creatures, are relived thanks to his near constant camera rolling done in order to salvage trip notes as well as forge a memoir of sorts... and to carry home a deliverable message about the environment. Saving bears and convincing park rangers, Alaskan legislators to boot, to facilitate this noble goal of nature's call, his call at that, transcend themselves into mainstays throughout Treadwell's adventures - a Northern Exposure. A brief expose on the protagonist now deceased - I'll give you two choices of his death's hungry little bear; 2) hungry big bear. [grizzlies both]
Timmothy Drexter, rearranged legally to Timmothy Treadwell, was raised amidst the pluralism that is Americana; small-town boy, athletic, a standout swimmer in highschool and later recipient of a swim-team scholarship, well-rounded lad, and so on and so forth. He strived and, one could say, in places thrived. But, as is so often the case with life's travails, his story was one heading for the doldrums, and yet worse - the bear claw.....[not the snack food you demented MF's!!!] Treadwell dropped longheld interests, engaged himself in hobbies unheard of so much as unbeknownst to close relatives, plus exceedingly sought higher ground - a grander life of the semi-bourgeiose in concotion with on-edge stunts of crazed lunacy only a delusional, well, lunatic would imagine and altogether accomplish (i.e. a lot of puffs of misfilled marlboros marring his formative years). Treadwell was a man astonishingly quirky while in conjunction periodically dormant and perturbed; this to some level suits his description. His downward spiral would rushingly approach, studio rejected hooves a clapping homeward bound, jettisoning his vision into a forbidden, forebodding zone of immense unforeseen turbidity as well as acerbic angst. Essentially, all is told, bitterness steadily enroached rearing its mindless head, finding Treadwell champing at the bit.....of sanity yet contained in his think box. The screws were gradually turning looser, where alternative escapades started making themselves all the more alluring. It just so happened this cultured and self-trained theatre hopeful came slamming against an impenetrable blockade, all too familiar to each his own, whether we admit or deny and opt out. Timothy Treadwell may be remembered as runner up, second place finisher to Woody Harlson for the Cheers bartender character liquered into stardom and affectionately recanted as 'Woody.' A missed opportunity at landing himself a role on a major NBC sitcom levelled his playing field quite a bit, and he quite reacted in vain. He now, years after the dreaded fact, decides to air-it-out for Alaska's remote quarters beginning in summer of 1990, longing for a way in which to make his mark on the world - acting salary knocked clear out of the picture. North to Alaska was he. Northward towards frigid forest, tumultuous tundra. Ingnored were the lurking animals of the deep as potential hazards and campsite invaders. To this notion he would make the ultimate sacrifice, taking along an admirer, a dear friend of his to their lives' ditto tragedy tour de force.
Alright, enough romanticizing. This tale isn't so much one of irrational personal folly, which to an extent it most certainly is, but instead a lesson of perserverance, determination, embracing adventure & distant travel; to put it bluntly, Treadwell's lore encapsulates a scheme of self-searching. It was to be the human world where Timothy Treadwell could not find his niche, his place among the clouds. In the realm of animal and beast - that woodsy domain of legend sending shivers straight down spines of the less attuned with nature and its power/fury - Timothy Treadwell came and conquered for 13 summers, spending all of 2-3 months hunkered amidst remote wilderness alongside its inalienable uncertainties. Treadwell never appears to take for granted these July-September months of tranquility, for he adapts and learns, be it through spells of sunshine or rainfall, how to fend for his own safety, how to keep his guard (exceptions: his having stored coolers in his tent; his camping at many sites beyond their restrictive safety measure of 5 days continous stay; getting too close to wild bears; setting tent in nondesignated park areas......the list of Park infringements is endless though meaningful in retrospect); and how to surmount difficult, overwhelming odds. Between tent-collapsing storm-driven gale force winds, threats to his well-being penned by visiting poachers/outdoorsmen, in addition to several encounters with not-so-friendly-but-very-instinctively-impulsive full grown grizzly bears; Treadwell escapes everything unscathed, though remains still damaged from within from prior experience in the human world. Timothy Treadwell's personal tapings and narrations of his own dances with nonexistence are dynamic, profound, illustritive pieces of artistry thankfully captured by a man not clever enough to survive the wild (as we shall see), though sensible enough to journal and record all manner of day-to-day circumstance.
Summer 2000, Summer 2001.....a couple future summers down the road, many looking back: These were periods of momentary blunder as well as inspirational personal achievement and rejuvenation. However, no matter how many get-aways Treadwell would embark, succeeding returns to normalcy - to society as we know it - never quite agreed with his morales, his eclectic tastes, nor his vision of harmony and balance needed among souls. This, the film Grizzly Man, is a story of a sole... soul seeking out a plane of peace, respect, natural beauty - elogance made animate, hope sprung alive without cease. In the film's crucial segments, Treadwell did succeed fulfilling his goals, his self-enforced obligations, as his daily Alaskan documentary prooves time and again. Treadwell sought difference; he became that difference - a contrast of consistency clashing with rage, turmoil, anthropomorphic spite/contempt. A scorn worn anxiously juxtaposing a joyous smile of exhuberance that frequently accompanies satisfying application of one's cherished qualities, best captures Treadwell's character and innate sensibilities.
A warm-hearted fellow, very hellbent on attracting attention to preserving not only Alaska's bear population, but eternal wildness; drastic landscape so permeated by awe inspiring wonder. In an alterable land, weatherwise, Treadwell discovers his mission of harping on those attrocities at the fore of forest and wildlife destruction - not forgetting the human influence and ultimate hand involved - is an uphill climb, a journey of fractional, constituent minor journies embedded therein. Many thanks owed to well paid Alaskan private pilots, he enters this jungle, this 'Grizzly Maze' by which he christens that particular part of the park in southeast Alaska flocked to each and every summer. Back in the maze he finds himself again, the year 2003, 13 summers running uninterrupted, though he is not to return before conclusion of the last of these.
Timothy Treadwell's untimely expiring took place under gruesome circumstance, his friend perishing by his side in the attack. After 13 years of living largely in concordance with grizzlies and foxes alike, amongst other wildlife, his fate would be sealed - gone now was a bright, witty, zany, caring individual - one September evening. A rare bear, one perhaps from the interior of the countryside - a nonnative of the habitat traveled to so reheasrsly, directly via commuter, by Treadwell - is the white elephant that was hiding in Treadwell's Alaskan room of tall pine and rippling river torrent. A lone person's conviction that nobility endures in the face of the wild, in the face of the brute and intemperate, shown foolish once more. Taming an as yet untouched serenity is risky business, grand scale in Treadwell's case - Alaska. It goes to show, the honest notion of 'risk meets reward' meets retaliation. And in the end, innocence is lost, good deeds are spat upon, ultimately the balance of intention vs. outcome isn't a given. Perhaps Timothy Treadwell's sweetness and kind hearted nature, albeit the source of his demise at the paws/jaws of the beast, can survive to instruct us of a sole positive moral ending this otherwise utter tragedy at best: When we humans devalue intention, when we become obssessed by the material, by the gratification immediacy of the physical world for all its traps and pitfalls.... we consume not only each other but ourselves. Timothy Treadwell may go down as the biggest out door's buffoon this side of Al Linder or Babe Winkelman, but all things considered, he is a patron's hero of courage, nobility, and making the waves when sign of trouble nears. He may have lost his physicality, but I think his clock still ticks --- see the film!
Movie Review: It Grabbed Me and Wouldn't Let Go
Summary: 5 Stars
I think that Werner Herzog's documentary "Grizzly Man" sheds new light on the Timothy Treadwell saga. From the three books that I read prior to viewing this film, "Among Grizzlies" by Treadwell and Palovak, "Death in the Grizzly Maze" by Lapinski, and "The Grizzly Maze" by Jans, my impressions of Treadwell ranged from misunderstood bear lover to suicidal eco-zealot. Not to slight any of the authors, but the bindings of their books simply can't hold or convey the visual and audible clues necessary to our understanding the crazy dead person that was Timothy Treadwell. To be honest, after viewing this film I still don't know the man, but that was not the purpose of the film. The film simply but powerfully documents Treadwell's imagined bond with brown grizzlies, while unambiguously exposing the fact that almost no bond existed. For me, Treadwell's death was an unfortunate but predictable event, while Amie Huguenard's fate was the real tragedy. Therefore, I judged that my already negative assessment of him was an opinion that would slip even more so by the end of the film. Prior to this film I had never seen Treadwell's videos, nor heard his voice, nor detected his sincerity, nor observed any of his alleged charm or emotional problems. What we immediately detect in this film is his child-like voice and effeminate mannerisms that may have passed for charm in some California circles. And curiously, we see gentle Tim's friend Jewel Palovak admitting that Treadwell had been taking prescription medication from a doctor for his mood swings, but that he eventually quit taking it. She tells how he said, "I can't have the middle ground. I have to have the highs and the lows." Apparently she and other Grizzly People gave Tim the green light to live among grizzlies despite knowing that the boy ain't right. At that point in the film I realized that what some critics had previously labeled as conjecture in Lapinski's book, now appears to be a confirmed medical fact. Also at that point, my assessment of Timothy Treadwell began to change.
"Grizzly Man" carves out what by now is a well-traveled path of friends, followers and acquaintances of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard. For me, the down-to-earth Alaskan bush pilot Willy Fulton is easily the most memorable of them all for his recollections of flying for Tim and Amie, and for his unflinching description of the day that he found his two friends dead. Video footage shot from the air and on the ground pinpoints the places where Timothy camped over the years while videotaping the brown grizzly bears, and the campsite where he and Amie were finally killed. Treadwell's own videos show him repeatedly violating the park rules in order to camp for extended periods of time among the bears, and then crowding them with his camera every chance he got. Treadwell's video images are accompanied by Herzog's careful narration and Richard Thompson's laconic guitar score. They guide us through a maze of Treadwell's own babbling narration and images that often expose Timothy's child-like perception of nature. The years of video tape that he shot inside Katmai National Park were calculated to mislead viewers about him being totally alone, despite the fact that he had made several trips out there accompanied by female companions besides Amie who remain anonymous. Still, he was a meticulous cinematographer, having shot scenes of such spectacular beauty that it prompts Werner Herzog to openly declare his admiration for Treadwell as a cinematographer. Conversely, Herzog's narration often runs anti-parallel to Treadwell's anthropomorphic musings, painting Timothy's world of nature with its beasts as being an unsympathetic jungle of chaos separated by space and time from a well-meaning but fatally flawed man.
Herzog selected about an hour of the over one hundred hours of video shot by Treadwell. The selected images paint a new picture of Timothy Treadwell, and reveal a new context for the circumstances of his death. We are treated not only to Timothy playing with an adoptive fox that he named Timmy, but to Treadwell gleefully palming fresh bear excreta with his hand, declaring that everything in the bear's world is perfect. We get to see an upset and confused Timothy agonizing over the deaths of a bear cub and a fox kit. There is one relatively long scene of him ranting and railing against the Park Service and the wilderness tourists, or perhaps as Herzog suggests, it was Timothy rebelling against civilization itself. During his rant, if it wasn't for the Alaskan scenery in the background, we might be watching the hidden camera video of a mental patient. And finally we get to meet some of the fine Grizzly People who supported Treadwell and launched him on his misguided expeditions. Visually, they project an image of what activists are supposed to look like, rather than being people who take the challenge in stride. Recalling their friend, they explained how Timothy cultivated a near religious experience with the bears. Yes, they actually said "religious experience." They seemed to be making excuses for him. But I also got the impression that they were making excuses for themselves, deflecting blame, and being almost apologetic. One wonders if they were mislead by Treadwell, or if it was the other way around. We can see the reaction of horror on the face of Jewel Palovak as she watches Herzog listening to the infamous audio recording of the bear attack. Herzog warns Palovak to never listen to the recording and to destroy the tape. It is a warning for us all. By crossing the line between man and bear, or as Herzog puts it, order and chaos, it was not a matter of if but when one of these anachronistic California flower children would be killed. It was symptomatic of the "logical disconnect" that Jans mentions in his book, except it's not just Treadwell that it applies to. This was where things went wrong for Tim and Amie and the Grizzly People. And this film is where my perceptions of Treadwell changed forever. It was difficult to watch these images and not feel pity for him. "Grizzly Man" is a film that grabbed me and wouldn't let go.
Movie Review: Portrait of a Narcissist
Summary: 5 Stars
Warning! This review reveals the end of the movie!
It became apparent from the first scene of "Grizzly Man" that I was watching raw film footage of a mentally ill man. Given that the bulk of the film consists of Timothy Treadwell talking into a camera, for the bulk of the film you, the audience member, seek entertainment or enlightenment from a raw encounter with a madman. Tourists used to visit asylums like Bedlam. As I watched this disturbing film, I asked myself, am I no better than those creepy tourists at Bedlam?
"Grizzly Man" also rapidly became amazingly boring. I say "amazingly" because you wouldn't think that a film depicting such a naked encounter - man against nature, or, properly, nature against man - would bore. But mentally ill people often are quite boring, and Treadwell, so lost inside his own sad, limited, dead-end mind, bored me.
I had to do a forced march through the boredom. And, I came to appreciate this movie as something it isn't marketed as at all, but definitely is. More on that, below.
Timothy Treadwell was a boyish, blond actor who spent thirteen summers doing primitive camping among what is sometimes labeled earth's largest land carnivore: Kodiak Island grizzly bears. (Polar bears are also sometimes labeled earth's largest land carnivore; let the bears duke it out for the title among themselves.) Treadwell and his willowy blonde companion, Amie Huguenard (you couldn't make these names up), were killed and devoured by a grizzly bear; the sounds of that attack were recorded by Treadwell's camera (the lens cap was left on . . . one can't help but think of the sad, sick jokes this might inspire.)
I knew all that going in, from a lengthy "Vanity Fair" expose; I thought, what can I get from this movie?
Werner Herzog adds minimal commentary. For the most part, you are watching film footage shot by Treadwell himself, of Treadwell himself. There are a few short scenes of the bush pilot who flew Treadwell in and out of his last campsite, the coroner who examined "four garbage bags full of human remains" pulled from the intestines of the killer grizzly, a Native American grizzly museum curator, Treadwell's suburban and normal parents, his flakey girlfriend Jewel Palovak, a male friend from California. No one advances any grand, overarching theory. Treadwell pere does indicate that losing the role of the bartender on "Cheers," that went to Woody Harrelson, drove his son into a downward spiral.
Given the minimal commentary, viewers will inevitably interpret Treadwell according to their own agendas. Rush-Limbaugh, exploit-the-earth types will denounce Treadwell as an "environmentalist wacko." This is wrong, of course; Treadwell has as much to do with true environmentalism as Mohammed Atta has to do with safe aircraft piloting.
Treadwell was not an environmentalist. He was not a symbol of the frontier. He was not a man obsessed by love. What Treadwell was, was a narcissist. Did Herzog miss this? I don't know if Herzog uses the word "narcissist" once. But what made this movie ultimately worth watching, for me, was its - perhaps inadvertent - presentation of a classic case study of narcissism.
The word "narcissism" gets tossed around a lot, often in ways that obscure its true meaning. Narcissists are not people who love themselves too much; in fact, true narcissists don't love themselves at all.
Narcissists detest themselves, and avoid, at all costs, any encounter with their true selves. Narcissists seek artificial, choreographed encounters, which they script and control, in which they can be seen as the superior beings that they want to be understood to be.
Unlike Treadwell, most narcissists don't create their dramas by interacting with wild animals; most narcissists create their dramas by interacting with people whom they can fool, manipulate, and control. For this reason, narcissists often associate with people they perceive as being less intelligent than they are, or weaker in some sense. Narcissists often seek out children, the ill, or the poor, whom they cast as characters in their productions.
In any encounter, though, the narcissist is not running toward intimacy, either with the self or the other; the narcissist is running away from contact with the self and the other at top speed.
I can't think of any more perfect encapsulation for narcissism than the image most common in "Grizzly Man." Treadwell sets up his camera on a tripod, and then stands in front of the camera, filming himself, with grizzlies in the background.
Treadwell goes on and on, repetitively, about what a great man he is, saying so explicitly. "I am a great man. I am doing great work. No one loves these grizzlies but I. No one is protecting these grizzlies but I. God is very happy with me" - he really says things like this. And the truly telling part of this triangle charade is this - there is nobody there. There is no audience. Treadwell filmed himself without any other people around. There is no grizzly. Treadwell did not understand these animals at all. He attributed feelings to them that they do not feel. And there is no Treadwell. This is a man who spent his last breath resisting any real encounter with himself.
There is a scene in which the real Tim Treadwell appears. He releases a torrent of violent verbal abuse against the real protectors of the grizzlies, the parks department. If you want to see the true scabrous soul of a narcissist, catch that scene.
There is true human emotion in the movie; I admire the scene where Herzog warns Palovak never to listen to the tape of the fatal grizzly attack, and I admire the concern the coroner shows for the victims whose deaths he must unravel, on the basis of semi-digested human remains.
Movie Review: Treading Well Beyond Invisible Wires
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most riveting documentaries of recent times. And only Werner Herzog could have made its many cogs mesh so tellingly and troublingly. By chronicling Timothy Treadwell's life and providing sympathetic but often-corrective commentary, Herzog shows how one man's benighted quest led him to filter out unpleasant facts in favor of self-aggrandizing fancies about his role in the scheme of things. (Treadwell not only looks a bit like the late John Denver but also seems plagued by the same egotistical drive to play the high-profile hero.)
Through Treadwell's footage as well as Herzog's own well-chosen interview sequences, we see the man whole: his naïveté and childlike delight, his folly, his self-dramatization, and the inner madness for which the natural world was perhaps a convenient but ultimately fatal escape hatch.
As soon as Treadwell styles himself the "protector" of millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness where grizzly bears are the top predator, we know that this man is headed for a horrid end. In his hyperbolic, self-indulgent protestations of love and protection toward the land and its creatures, we hear the unmistakable accent of a megalomaniacal solipsist -- a man whose magical thinking allows him to live in a "peaceable kingdom" where he can rewrite the rules of nature and reprimand her creatures for being what they are. As King Lear would say, "That way madness lies."
It is one of the film's many ironies that when Treadwell actually comes upon what he assumes to be bear poachers, he consciously chooses to remain hidden. Apparently, he planned to report the incident: on camera he fastidiously notes the time (down to the 18th second!) when the filming took place. But one can only conclude that when it comes to real cases, the "Great Protector" is nothing more than the "Great Pretender."
To his credit, Treadwell and the photographic assistant he'd prefer us to forget about (to bolster his self-made-man-from-Australia myth) captured many extraordinary features of Alaskan wildlife that we might otherwise never see. At the same time, however, by becoming a leading character in the show, Treadwell may also be unwittingly falsifying what we see: is this how the animals would behave in the presence of chroniclers to whom they were *not* habituated or whose presence they could *not* detect? Maybe we need both kinds of documentation.
Perhaps most striking of all is the paradoxical sweet-and-sour view of nature that Treadwell repeatedly displays -- here infantilizing some of the most ferocious carnivores on the continent (often giving them cartoonish monikers like "Mr. Chocolate," as if naming were taming), there acknowledging the deadly danger of what he is doing. Both sides of the paradox fuel Treadwell's self-aggrandizement: he can treat these creatures like oversize pets while reveling in whatever special personal charm keeps him safe. In reality, he was just supremely lucky that before October 2003, he had encountered no bear desperately hungry enough to see him and girlfriend Amie Huguenard as a two-course meal. Treadwell may have died doing what *he* wanted to do (and he may well have wanted to die in just this way), but we have good reason to doubt Amie's assent to a comparable fate as the desirable way to go.
For me at least, the scene that most tellingly sums up Treadwell's faulty vision finds him crouched in a tent during a violent rainstorm. (He has, to his mind, virtually summoned up the deluge by registering a near-infantile tantrum of protest with all the higher powers, so that the rivers may flow abundantly and "his" starving bears may catch their fill of fish. Curiously, the same man who bewails cannibalized bear cubs and dead little foxes shows no sympathy for the salmon that will get crushed alive in the mouths of bears -- yet another example of Treadwell-style tunnel vision.) We soon see him snuggling a favorite toy from childhood that had first appeared only moments earlier during an interview with his grieving parents. And whaddya know? It's a teddy bear, that adorable stuffed animal that gives us all our first false lesson in bear lore. I suspect that Treadwell never fully accepted the shocking difference between real bears and their childhood impostors. Decades ago at the Denver Zoo, I saw a sign that offered a curt corrective to the Great TB Fallacy: "All bears are dangerous." You'd better believe it, Winnie-the-Pooh!
I think part of Treadwell believed that, but a stronger part didn't want this inconvenient fact to block his irrational impulse to "domesticate" an untamable force of nature to which native people (who have lived in bear country for millennia) have the good sense to give a wide berth of awe and respect. Neither boundless optimism nor American pioneering spirit nor Edenic wishful thinking can trump nature's rules of engagement. The natural world is a dense network of largely invisible trip wires: we humans have no foolproof sense for detecting whether we have transgressed another creature's invisible perimeter-alert system before we're too far inside to escape its tooth and claw. Nature responds simply and effectively to foolhardiness: her creatures devour the unwary and the unwise.
At one point during a manic tirade against the National Park Service, Treadwell screams, "Animals rule!" -- or something to that effect. Yes! But for all his immersion in the wild, the self-absorbed Treadwell never grasps the nature of Nature. Where wild animals rule, tread well and wisely -- or not at all.
Movie Review: Timothy Treadwell: Another Dreamer To Argue About
Summary: 5 Stars
This documentary is a few years old, but it seems to pick up sales and interest around the holidays - somewhat a disturbing trend, when you consider Treadwell will forever be known as the guy who went up to Alaska and got eaten by bears. I actually have an opinion of why it's a popular documentary around the end of each year: the pending New Year will always bring reflection, looking back, and wondering where, if we have not yet realized them, our dreams have gone. Therefore, a movie about a man who did what he wanted to do - hell, he packed up every year and went up and lived with 700 pound bears, filmed them and gave each and every one of them names -, is interesting. His journey may have ended badly and tragically - even moreso because his girlfriend was also killed by the bear which killed Timothy -, but at least, he followed his heart. This may be why Treadwell has so many followers and fans; like another young man who went to Alaska, Christopher McCandless Into the Wild [Blu-ray] (Chris would be found dead from starvation a few months after walking 'into the wild' of Denali National Park), Timothy will be the subject of argument forever. I myself am surprised that, although I think the documentary is brilliant, well directed and beautifully photographed, I have far less sympathy for Treadwell than I do for the beforementioned McCandless, because both men seem cut from the same cloth. But, while McCandless was obviously responsible for his own end as well, he did not 'intrude' on nature to any noted extent, nor did he try to 'change' a wild bear's mental makeup. McCandless, while a loner with some real dysfunctions, seems to have been -for lack of a better description - a danger to nobody but himself. Timothy, on the other hand, put into motion the events which ultimately cost his girlfriend her life, and I do agree with one of the individuals interviewed that Treadwell may have 'done more harm to the bears than (helped them).' As other reviewers mention, the bears caught on film often truly do seem confused at this man's presence, and very few seem all that happy. If you are going to disagree with me after watching this film, please go back and track the 'lighthearted' moments between Timothy and nature - they are almost all of the wild foxes, which sit quietly as Timothy pets them. You can see the man's good intentions, then, in these scenes, but there is a hell of a difference in a fox the size of a family's pet dog and a bear the weight of four average grown men. I found myself thinking that had Treadwell just figured out borders, and what lines not to step over, he might still be here. I would gladly suffer the loss of some close up shots of the bears if Tim were still around to turn out panoramic scenes, more work on the foxes, so forth. And so... why didn't this man, why didn't Chris McCandless, why didn't so many other unnamed individuals whom have yet to have documentaries made about them, books written about them, know when to step back from the precipice (a precipice that Treadwell himself acknowledges, in the film, that he is dancing along the edges of)? Well, that's what makes the story so fascinating. The majority of mankind will have dreams, and some will never even get to begin to follow them; the day to day life will take over, the bills will need paying, and so forth. Then there are the few who will set out to discover their dreams; they'll backpack, hitchhike, get up on stage with a guitar they saved four paychecks to buy, and they'll damned well try...and an even smaller percentage will succeed, reach the peak of the mountain, the edge of the sea, receive the applause and praise that they sought. Then - then...there are the one or two or six or eight, in this entire world, who will do a Treadwell or McCandless and do what they think they must do, and they will become so determined to live those dreams, that slowly (or maybe not so slowly, maybe Treadwell, watching and listening to him in this film, knew all along what was going to happen - he says again and again different mantras of "I'll die for my bears")they are no longer are dreams, they are necessity. And when dreams become necessity, that is when stopping at the edge of the precipice and looking over, and allowing oneself to be thrilled and proud of that accomplishment in itself, isn't enough. There's only one thing to do from that point then, and that is jump, and I personally believe that Timothy Treadwell jumped. We are watching a man basically commit suicide on film, and we know it, and he knew it, and he didn't care how his actions would affect survivors, family members, even viewers - I was stunned at some of the gruesome footage of the bear that purportedly killed Treadwell and his girfriend, cut open in search of body parts. But it is a fascinating film that one watches, nonetheless, and not for a 'snuff film' sick thrill. It is a reminder that we are each only human, we are way, way down on the universal and karmic food chain, and we had better not get too big for our britches. There is no denying that Treadwell was a dreamer, but dreams, you have to remember, can be both good...or nightmares, and they are of our own making. A five star tale of caution-