Grizzly Man (DVD)

...he would camp amidst the grizzly bears of the coastal section of the Katmai National Park in Alaska. Cutting a dashing figure with his almost-welded-on sunglasses, bandana and Boris Johnson hair, he would film, study and (controversially) interact with the wildlife during these years, taking it upon himself to preserve the area and its animal inhabitants from the threat posed by humanity. His ethos prevented him from carrying any sort of weapons ...
...DVD: 'In The Edges: The Grizzly Man Session', a documentary showing the creation of the music for the film. Herzog wanted no music written in advance of the final cut, and because of this the soundtrack was improvised by guitar legend Richard Thompson and others under the director's watchful eye. Unsurprisingly, this renders 'In The Edges' something of a curio, although it's always good to hear Thompson's wonderful playing, and the documentary has ... more

In the last 30 years or so, two larger-than-life figures have been conspicuously enslaved by their twin loves of a) dangerous animals, and b) being on camera. 'Grizzly Man' is the tale of the one that isn't Steve Irwin.

The Bear Necessities

It's a mighty, mighty big world out there. A world of majesty and wonder, a glorious canvas of vast landscapes peopled by strange and fabulous creatures. Yep, nature is a beautiful thing.

Doesn't stop you from being served up as part of her bountiful smorgasbord, though.

Timothy Treadwell was a child of the Long Island suburbs. At school, only his diving ability marked him out as anything other than an ordinary pupil: a 'B' student rather than an 'A', according to his parents. At college his diving scholarship was lost to a combination of heavy drinking and a back injury, so the young man moved out to California, intending to become an actor. A few bit parts aside, this wasn't the fresh start he wanted, and Treadwell spiralled into alcohol and drug addiction. A near fatal overdose fortunately galvanised him, and he decided to reinvent himself: thus was born Timothy Treadwell: self-styled 'actor, recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and eco-warrior'.

With particular emphasis on the latter. Treadwell had always loved animals, and he now took his teddy bear fixation from childhood to the next level: for the next 13 (rather eventful) summers, he would camp amidst the grizzly bears of the coastal section of the Katmai National Park in Alaska. Cutting a dashing figure with his almost-welded-on sunglasses, bandana and Boris Johnson hair, he would film, study and (controversially) interact with the wildlife during these years, taking it upon himself to preserve the area and its animal inhabitants from the threat posed by humanity. His ethos prevented him from carrying any sort of weapons to protect himself from the bears he adored, and at the end of the 13th season, this precipitated a somewhat inevitable conclusion.

'Help! It's the Hair Bear Bunch!'

With his media profile (he once appeared on the David Letterman Show, with the host jokingly telling him he'd end up being eaten by a bear if he wasn't careful) and grisly (sic) demise, some sort of film about Treadwell was inevitable. For a while Leonardo di Caprio was attached to a biopic, but eventually the 100 odd-hours of footage the late eco-warrior had amassed were used as the backbone for a documentary, produced by the Discovery Channel. The project called for someone with an operatic sense of the tragic, with a deep and fundamental grasp of the madness that can take root in anyone. And above all, it needed someone who would recognise the mindset that might make someone choose to work in close proximity with something unpredictable, unknowable and dangerous.

Realistically, they had to call Werner Herzog.

For not only did Herzog have an impressive catalogue of documentaries to his name over and above his feature presentations, but he had also collaborated on five films with the retina-scorchingly intense actor Klaus Kinski. I say 'collaborated': what I really mean to say is that 'on five separate occasions the two of them shared a film set for months on end, and by some miracle of planetary alignment neither of them actually killed the other'. This was creative tension in the raw: legendarily, on the set of Fitzcarraldo (a film about an Irish rubber baron in the Amazon who drags a 320 ton steamship over a mountain, a feat actually performed during filming) Kinski so enraged the natives enlisted as extras that they begged Herzog to allow them to kill his star actor. During production of Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Kinski became annoyed at the noise emanating from a hut where the crew were playing cards...his entirely proportional response was to randomly fire three rifle rounds into the building, blowing the top joint off of one extra's finger. And on the same film, as Kinski tried to walk off set, Herzog promised that he would shoot first the actor and then himself unless he stayed. But, from the bowels of this madness crawled several ludicrous, unforgettable films of proto-Wagnerian scope, so maybe the ends justified the means. So long as you consider fingers to be acceptable collateral damage, obviously.

'Who's Been Sleeping In My Bed? Some Sort of Shane Warne Lookalike?'

A man with Herzog's vast experience was always going to be wise to the fact that Treadwell's tale needed no bells and whistles to tell it effectively. There are no structural gimmicks to 'Grizzly Man': just a straightforward mosaic of interviews and accounts from the man's associates and friends, reinforced by the opinions of non-connected experts. Herzog himself narrates in the softest of Teutonic tones while making several carefully chosen appearances in front of the camera, serving to emphasise his investment in the material: he isn't merely doing a job and cashing a cheque.

It also means that you're aware that you are seeing Werner Herzog's interpretation of Treadwell's life, his motivations, and of the world he worked in and its machinations. This is important to remember when watching a film about such a 'colourful' character who would inevitably polarise opinions: when a director has so much material to work from, his selections from within it can drastically alter the viewer's reaction to the subject. Treadwell can be seen either as a beautiful child of the universe, a universe never meant for one as beautiful as him, or as a ridiculous looking and almost hilariously misguided walking Darwin Award. And of course all points in between. Although others disagree, I tend towards the view that Herzog has managed to articulate his own reaction to Treadwell's life and fate while still leaving the viewer free to arrive at his own decision.

'That's What Tiggers Do Best!'

It's very easy to simply cackle at what you discover. Treadwell the self-proclaimed 'Kind Warrior' was largely a personal invention of the man born Timothy Dexter. His failed acting career (he claimed to have come second to Woody Harrelson in the casting call for the part of 'Woody the Barman' in 'Cheers': no independent source has ever confirmed or denied this story, although one suspects Mr Harrelson might have been better qualified if only in the Christian name department) precipitated his rebirth, and his own personal videos, as presented in 'Grizzly Man', are both awesome and awesomely entertaining so long as you put aside the inconvenient fact of his ending up messily dead.

It's obvious that Treadwell adored the animals he lived with. It's also obvious that while there was a toxic streak of self-loathing squirting through his veins, Timothy loved himself quite a bit too. He agonises over whether a particular shot will look better with the bandana, without the bandana, running, not running, carrying a video camera, not carrying it. There is a considerable amount of footage of Treadwell bragging about the danger inherent in what he does, how he'll be decapitated if he isn't stronger than the bear...how he's the only thing protecting the bear (presumably because at this point he hadn't yet become intimately acquainted with their 1000lb weight, powerful jaws, claws and digestive system)... 'Come here and try to do what I do...and you will die. You will die here. I'm just different...I'm tough enough...I love these bears enough to survive.' And as the years go by, he finds it harder to suppress his demons: 'Animals Rule! Timothy Conquered! F*ck you, Park Service!' These aren't the words of an ardent environmentalist warning people to stay away...they're the words of a man attempting to psyche himself up. Or merely with a death wish.

But in amongst all this, it has to be conceded that Treadwell succeeded in shooting some of the most extraordinary wildlife footage ever seen. This may be because he had the unfair advantage over the BBC Natural History Unit of being a misguided fool with no sense of his own mortality, but Herzog wisely realises that this material is his trump card, and he leans heavily on it. On numerous occasions the viewers eyes will widen, their jaw will drop and their sphincters loosen. Centre stage is an astonishingly savage fight, shot from an uncomfortably close range, between two male bears (with a seagull amusingly trying to sneak away once it notices what's going on) competing for the attentions of a female that Treadwell had nicknamed 'Saturn' (Treadwell's names for the bears are amongst the most ludicrous things in the film: 'Mr Chocolate', 'The Grinch', 'Aunt Melissa', 'Demon Hatchet'...it's little wonder that the chopper pilot who surveyed the aftermath of Treadwell's final interaction with a bear wasn't sympathetic. 'He seemed to think he was working with people in bear costumes... he got what he deserved. The bears thought there was something wrong with him'). Somewhat cuter are his playful encounters with a family of foxes, talking to them, petting them and stroking them. This, of course, is where Treadwell fails as a proper environmentalist: there may be a considerable debate as to whether by merely observing the operation of an ecosystem you're already altering it, but by the time you're encouraging wild animals to come up to you to be fussed over, the debate is frankly over.

Bad News Bears

What prevents even the most black-humoured onlooker from simply shaking their head and chuckling at Treadwell's behaviour and apposite ending is that it didn't just claim him. His girlfriend Amie Huguenard died with him, and her shadow is cast long and dark over 'Grizzly Man', a tragically vague figure. It would be very easy to condemn her boyfriend for 'getting her killed', especially with the revelation that she'd always been scared of the bears in the first place. To his credit, Herzog refuses to be quite so crass: there is no evidence that Huguenard was or wasn't directly coerced into her fateful two summer holidays with Treadwell, and to suggest post-mortem that she didn't know better (or that he should have, for that matter) would be a bit of a slight on her intelligence.

All of this is presented without gimmickry by Herzog, but he's not above using a narrative filmmaker's imagery tricks to garner a reaction. Quite possibly the grimmest moment in 'Grizzly Man' features Herzog listening on headphones to the audio footage of the fatal attack on Treadwell and Huguenard as Treadwell's ex-girlfriend looks on: a maker of feature films instinctively knows that it's not what you see that affects you, it's what you don't see, and one can only imagine the dreadful reality held on that tape while watching Herzog's face as he listens. A slightly contrived scene, but no less troubling for it.

But by and large, the German has succeeded in making a film without artifice: in its heart, it believes that Treadwell was wrong, but it won't condemn him for it.

'We All Stand Together...'

There is one substantial extra on the DVD: 'In The Edges: The Grizzly Man Session', a documentary showing the creation of the music for the film. Herzog wanted no music written in advance of the final cut, and because of this the soundtrack was improvised by guitar legend Richard Thompson and others under the director's watchful eye. Unsurprisingly, this renders 'In The Edges' something of a curio, although it's always good to hear Thompson's wonderful playing, and the documentary has some interesting moments for those of us fascinated by the workings of the creative process.

Oh, and the trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogYDUmIigw0

So, all documentaries inevitably bump up against the fact that reality tends not to be neatly plotted, even realities with a starkly obvious denouement such as this one, and the non-Michael-Moore documentarian needs to be cautious as to how hard he pushes any agendas he possesses or viewpoints they've arrived at. The job of this one is to set a scene and paint in as much detail as the viewer needs to draw their own conclusions. Herzog has largely achieved this, and while he may have portrayed the late man with an emphasis on the last three syllables of 'environmentalist', he has nursed Treadwell's amazing footage (for a man who obviously fancied himself as a filmmaker, you'd imagine he'd be delighted) out into the light, and it's that for which 'Grizzly Man' will stick in the mind for a long, long time. It's obvious that while Timothy Treadwell may not have been smarter than the average bear, he was definitely more complex than any of them: Treadwell invented a persona that his troubled soul could live with, and ran with it: a considerable, and considerably worrying feat.

There's a moment in the film where a bear is swimming in a placid pool, and Treadwell wades in to join it. As the bear swims past, Treadwell reaches out to touch its nose, and the bear snaps at him very very crossly indeed. Possibly it's as well to remember: you may love the animals, but the chances are they don't care much for you.

And what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But to Timothy Treadwell this bear was a friend...a saviour - Werner Herzog

(Available for a fiver on Amazon)

An alternative, critical view of Treadwell's portrayal and Herzog's film, from a man who has similarly interacted with bears, only with the common sense to carry pepper spray while he did it... http://cloudline.org/treadwell.html 

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