Grizzly Man
EVERY SUMMER FOR 13 years, Timothy Treadwell lived with bears. Former drug addict, failed actor, environmentalist and self-styled “kind warrior”, Treadwell would pitch camp in the Alaskan wilderness of Katmai, unarmed even with pepper spray, and flagrantly break National Park Service laws to bring himself hazardously close to the creatures he loved. Creatures he identified with more than humans, to the degree that he considered himself “one of them”. Then, on 5 October 2003, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by a grizzly, leaving only a few gnawed bones, a wristwatch and more than 100 hours of film footage.
Throughout his 59-year career as a filmmaker of both narrative features and documentaries, Werner Herzog has remained enthralled by obsessive outsiders who — like him — kick hard against normality in search of profound truths. Eccentric extremists such as Lope de Aguirre or Brian Sweeney ‘Fitzcarraldo’ Fitzgerald (both played by Klaus Kinski in the director’s two most famous movies), admirable for their tenacity, questionable for their methods, and often doomed. Just like Timothy Treadwell. “He’s a member of the family,” the Bavarian auteur told the BBC’S Culture Show in 2006 (the episode where, incidentally, he was shot by an air rifle while talking to Mark Kermode). “He had something in his nature which reminds me of some of my leading characters.”
Grizzly Man, then, is the ideal marriage of director and subject, a dazzling conjunction made all the more remarkable by the fact that it’s the accidental result of the most mundane of mishaps: the loss of a pair of spectacles.
During the early summer of 2004, Herzog was visiting his friend Erik Nelson, a TV documentary producer, when he realised he’d mislaid his glasses and started scanning Nelson’s untidy desk. Nelson mistakenly assumed it was an article about Treadwell’s death that had ensnared his pal’s attention, and urged him to read this amazing story which he was turning into a film for Discovery Networks. Herzog did so, and was instantly hooked. He asked what the status of the project was. Nelson said, “I’m kind of directing it.” Herzog locked eyes with Nelson
and replied, “I will direct this movie.” Nelson could hardly refuse. After all, as he later put it, “Werner was the perfect person for this story.”
Without Herzog (and no disrespect to Nelson), Grizzly Man could have ended up as little more than elaborately mounted evidence for a Darwin Awards entry. Treadwell cuts a ridiculous figure, with his long-fringed, Prince Valiant hairdo, his childish voice, his daft, sub-seagal action-hero posturing. But this is not merely the anatomy of a curious tragedy. It is also a nature film like no other. Once Herzog started delving into the amateur naturalist’s footage, even he was surprised at what he’d uncovered. So much so, the seemingly unflappable ex-smoker had to pop outside the editing suite for a quick, nervesoothing fag before he could carry on watching.
As anyone who worked on Planet Earth might tell you, Treadwell broke all the nature-doc rules. He named the bears (Mr Chocolate, Sergeant Brown, Aunt Melissa…), anthropomorphised them, tried to touch them and interfered with their habitat, reasoning he was their spiritually appointed “caretaker”. But he captured some truly astonishing images, from a long, savage bear fight, to the play of a family of foxes, to the silent dance of reed grass in a gusty breeze.
Then there are the moments Treadwell — possibly bipolar (though Herzog never attempts a diagnosis) — turns the camera on himself, soul stripped bare. There are his heartfelt confessionals, in which he tearily credits the bears with “giving me a life”. His paranoid, Joe Pesci-esque, F-bombing rants against the Park Service. And one fantastically unhinged appeal for divine intervention to end a drought (“MELISSA IS EATING HER BABIES!”) that seems weirdly successful.
Even if Nelson or another filmmaker had included such breathtakingly elevating material, it still couldn’t have been the non-fiction masterpiece
Herzog made of it. Because, well, Herzog. Through his grave but lyrical, unironic-teutonic voiceover, he makes this a penetratingly personal odyssey, both connecting with Treadwell and critiquing him. He is the narrator as foil, drawing our attention to his subject’s shortcomings as well as his gifts, as unafraid to push his own antiromantic interpretation of Treadwell as the blondmopped Grizzly Man was to push his own hyperromantic interpretation of the bears he stalked. “Here I differ with Treadwell,” Herzog levelly narrates after his subject reacts with distress to the cannibalisation of a cub. “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” If Treadwell’s view of nature is dangerous Disneyfication, then Herzog is the nihilist’s David Attenborough.
Yet Herzog never treats Treadwell with anything less than utmost respect. The film’s signature scene involves the director listening to the audio of the fatal bear attack (Treadwell’s camera rolled as he and Huguenard died, but the lens cap was on) while he sits with Treadwell’s closest colleague, Jewel Palovak. He is visibly shaken by what he’s hearing, on headphones, and decrees that neither Palovak nor his audience should ever hear it. The moment couldn’t be more powerful, nor more sensitively handled.
The film is all the better for its maker’s firmhanded subjectivity. Grizzly Man examines the beautiful, harsh nature of wildlife; the impact of human nature on the dark boundary of civilisation; and offers mesmerising insight into the singular nature of Werner Herzog himself.
It is the ultimate nature documentary. Sorry,
Sir David. DAN JOLIN
Number of times he’s been shot with an air rifle whilst in the middle of an interview with Mark Kermode
Oscar nomination (for Encounters At The End Of The World — Best Documentary, Features, 2009)