Grizzly Man
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Movie Reviews of Grizzly Man
Movie Review: Eccentric Captivation.
Summary: 5 Stars
My father was the person who first told me about this documentary. Upon hearing about it, I wasn't sure what to expect. I didn't recognize who "Timothy Treadwell" was and I don't think I had ever herd of Werner Herzog before (when I first saw the movie I almost fainted because I thought the former manager of the St. Louis Cardinals had made this film). After seeing the movie, I remembered that I had seen Treadwell before when he had appeared on television and I was corrected about the mistaken identity of the director. After viewing the movie, I was flabbergasted. It honestly is one of the most well-done documentaries about a person that I have ever seen.
GRIZZLY MAN is a movie about the life of Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell had performed several odd jobs during his life, but worked largely as an actor. At one point in his life he was one of two finalists for the role of "Woody" on "Cheers", but lost out to Woody Harrelson. Afterwards, Treadwell's life went downhill for awhile until he discovered (or perhaps it was rediscovered) nature. I don't remember if GRIZZLY MAN explains how Treadwell became infatuated with grizzly bears, but he did. He began sneaking into a protected (and dangerous) area of Alaska to hang out with the grizzlies. He filmed many of these moments and must have believed himself to be a Steve Irwin of the grizzly bears. However, unlike Steve Irwin, Timothy Treadwell was not a trained naturalist, zoologist, and biologist. He hung out with the bears and thought they liked him; he believed he was one of them and he thought they did, too. The locals believed Treadwell was crazy and that the only reason the bears didn't harm him was because they could sense he was crazy. Treadwell was tragically killed in 2003 with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear. It was a bear he was not familiar with and one that had traveled far south in search of food.
Considering the material that GRIZZLY MAN was based, the film could have turned out terribly. In lesser hands the life of Treadwell might have been parodied and his life made to be a joke. Herzog does not do that. Instead, using interviews and footage that Treadwell shot himself, he presents a very revealing, compassionate, and moving film that captures the best and worst of Treadwell's life.
Documentaries are not for everyone, but this is one documentary that I highly recommend that just about anyone can enjoy. It is a fascinating picture about an eccentric and captivating man.
Movie Review: Excellent Study of Do-gooder Mind
Summary: 5 Stars
I recommend this film because it's an excellent study of the "do-gooder" mind taken to the extreme. Herzog has taken us into the inner mind of people who think they can become something they are not, and attempt to live in dangerous worlds with a belief that they will not suffer consequences just because they intend to do well.
Treadmill's greatest contribution in life may be those 100+ hours of tape, rather than any substantive contribution he made to the bears' well being. (In this sense, Treadmill is much more film maker, and much less protector of bears.) In the film's narration, Herzog himself states that he is most fascinated with Treadmill as a film maker, rather than anything else Treadmill claimed he was.
Herzog's film-making craft is superb: he demonstrated how Treadwell wanted to become a bear, or at least cross into the bears' world in a deeper manner than humans are capable. Herzog also demonstrated how Treadwell kept himself deluded about the fact that his actions could actually harm the bears more than help them and that he would never be harmed himself despite repeatedly engaged in high-risk behavior.
I also find uncanny parallels between Treadwell and do-gooders from America over in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I write this review a female reporter from the Christian Science Monitor has been kidnapped and may or may not still be alive. I'm not sure her motivations for going to Iraq, but I'm left to wonder did she think, live Treadwell, that she could live among "bears" and not get mauled to death? Did she ever think that her being in Iraq actually may be harming Iraqis more than helping them? Did she ever question whether she could become a PR tool for Iraqi fighters or foreign Muslim extremists, just as Treadwill became food for the bears?
I'm one for helping my fellow brothers and sisters in this world, and I try. However, Herzog's piece is an excellent study and helped me reflect about what my true motivations are when I attempt to help others and what consequences may follow that I didn't intend.
Also, I recommend that film students (as well as the lay-viewer like me who has an arm's-length interest in cinematic arts) watch and take notes of the DVD's special feature where Herzog is working with the musicians and soundtrack production crew. This feature in its own right is an excellent study of the creative process in soundtrack development and Herzog's approach.
Movie Review: Man's Search for Meaning
Summary: 5 Stars
Simply, this movie isn't about bears.
It's not about a man "getting what he deserved," meddling with nature, or violating the law. This movie is barely about the main character, Tim Treadwell; his psychosis, his inability to grasp what many of us take for granted (especially the danger inherent in nature), are largely window dressing disguising the fundamental issues raised by the film.
So many reviewers tuned into this movie expecting a nature documentary, and when they got a two-hour analysis on a desperate man, and a subtle commentary on how far modern man will go to find meaning, they tuned out. "He's crazy, a lunatic," they write, as though this wasn't obvious to all from the very first shot of Treadwell. These same reviewers likely think "Hoop Dreams" was about college basketball recruiting and "March of the Penguins" truly about birds in Antarctica. I can't argue with the other reviewers; it's like throwing a ball against a wall.
This movie is about modern man, and about his search for meaning. Treadwell, a failed actor and recovering alcoholic, had nothing to live for before he found the bears in the Alaskan wilderness. He found meaning in the animals; found meaning in his life. It was misguided and shortsighted, sure. But like Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild," Treadwell's desperate need to find something, anything in his life that had meaning fascinates those of us who stare out of glass towers from 9 to 5 wondering what all this is about, anyway. Treadwell couldn't find anything of substance in his life until he found these simple creatures in this simple land. What he found was more than most of us will ever find.
The movie's a scathing indictment of the modern world, where most people think "meaning" is something downloadable onto an iPod, and a movie about a man living among bears is really about a man living among bears, and not about a man trying to live.
It's a wonderful movie, as complex and rich as any I've ever seen. I'm haunted by it, really.
Tim Treadwell gets eaten by a bear. This is five minutes of the movie. The remaining 115 minutes is dedicated to showing us how alienated a completely normal man can become in this steel world of ours--where organized religion has become irrelevant and outright quaint, where TV is savior of all--and the lengths some of us will go to to find meaning.
It's a wonderful journey.
Movie Review: The Aguirre of the Aquarian Age
Summary: 5 Stars
"Grizzly Man" is a powerful movie by Werner Herzog, a movie about the life of Timothy Treadwell, who hardly needs a closer introduction. Treadwell lived around brown bears in Katmai (a national park in Alaska) for thirteen seasons in a row, somehow getting the wild bears to tolerate his presence. He became a national celebrity in the United States, claiming to defend the bears from poachers and other threats. In 2003, tragedy struck: Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by brown bears as they were camping in an area Treadwell called the Grizzly Maze.
Herzog's movie paints Treadwell as a loner who gradually looses grip on reality and rejects Western civilization as he becomes more and more obsessed with the bears. Treadwell wants to bond with Mother Nature, unable to realize that nature is chaos and brutality rather than love and harmony. Eventually, he looses it completely, and develops a veritable death wish. "Grizzly Man" implies that the death of Treadwell at the hands of a bear might actually have been a form of suicide. To Herzog, Treadwell is an idealist who crosses the line between beast and man, and gets punished for it. His destruction is seen as inevitable. In a sense, Timothy Treadwell becomes the New Age version of Aguirre.
I don't deny that the movie is captivating and the message powerfully delivered. But is it true? Probably not. Here and there, another possible explanation for Treadwell's behaviour emerges: he had a celebrity complex and wanted to shoot a sensational film, with himself as the lead actor. Judging by Mike Lapinski's book "Death in the Grizzly Maze", this comes closer to the truth. Frankly, I suspect Treadwell was something of a con artist. Where Herzog saw a man slowly descending into madness, I see an actor playing out a part. The man may have been "nuts" in the everyday sense of that term, not to mention reckless and irresponsible, but I can't find any evidence of a death wish in Lapinski's book. Still, even Lapinski is willing to concede that Treadwell might have suffered from a clinical condition, bipolar disorder.
Ultimately, of course, everyone must make up his or her own mind about Timothy Treadwell. "Grizzly Man" is a good place to start. Then, read Mike Lapinski's "Death in the Grizzly Maze", Nick Jans' "The Grizzly Maze" and Treadwell's own book "Among Grizzlies".
Movie Review: Crazy For Bears
Summary: 5 Stars
Like other reviewers, I found myself wishing Timothy Treadwell could have gotten help for his obvious mental illness. But by limiting his contact to equally out-of-touch people he put himself on the slippery slope to his own horrifying end.
Yes, the man filmed spectacular footage of the
Grizzly Bears, but his documentation was interspersed with a disturbing self-portrait of an sick, egomaniacal, anthropromorphic person who never grasped the reality of what he was dealing with. The bears didn't "love" him as he believed they did. They merely tolerated him as he played his daily game of Wilderness Russian Roulette.
Throughout the film, he by turns reveres and rages at nature. He professes to love nature, while at the same time seeking to interfere with the natural process. He "adopts" a young red fox, acclimating it to people in a way that can only bode ill for an animal that should have a healthy distrust for humans. At one point, Treadwell tries to help the bears by constructing a "path" for the salmon during a drought and then railing at the bears for eating their own young when the fish don't follow it downstream as he had hoped. In another eerie moment, he brushes a fly from the face of a dead fox, admonishing the insect to "show some respect." Here is a man who claimed superior knowledge of the wild yet failed to understand that a fly has no motive beyond following its instinct.
Treadwell's story is one of unrequited love, and one has to wonder whether in his last, horrifying moments he felt betrayal at being killed by the very animals he fancied to be under his protection.
It was a sobering conclusion, but those who say Treadwell didn't leave a legacy are wrong. His misguided attempts to be one with nature should serve as a lesson that - while animals should be appreciated - they should be respected for what makes them different from humans. People who seek to bond with nature in such an unnatural way not only risk their own lives, but the lives of the animals who don't understand that the next human crossing their path will more than likely mean them harm.
Treadwell's is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to take their love of nature too far. But it is an unforgettable tale, and if you see "Grizzly Man" you will never quite be able to get the hauntingly disturbing train-wreck of one man's life - and death - out of your head.