Grizzly Man

It took me a long time to get around to seeing Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. I watched it in two sittings- the first half during which I was disappointed, and the second half I enjoyed. I had expected the documentary to be more sophisticated, less didactic, perhaps more experimental. Once my expectations were put aside I was able to appreciate the curiosity and nuances of Timothy Treadwell, the infamous bear protector and protagonist. It makes sense that Herzog would be interested in this story about a self-documenting manic animal activist who rages against man-made society for our failure to adequately love the bears. However, I didn't appreciate Herzog's moralizing two-liners throughout the film, the omniscient faceless voice-over that frames the entire tale. Nonetheless, Timothy Treadwell is a fascinating persona, and his intense religousness about a benevolent Nature and her creatures is one that I can both relate to, and am afraid of. There is the sparkle of madness in his eyes whenever he talks to his imagined audience, and his devotion to his chosen semi-illegal cause of camping directly in the middle of wild grizzly territory for 13 summers smacks of zealotry and abandon. The characters surrounding him, including his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend/secretary, the coroner, all connote a similar kind of idiosyncrasy; in other words, they all seem a bit cooky. This makes them potent exploits for a documentarian, and Herzog certainly does use them as such, albeit with a kind of gentleness and sincerity that comes through. I was moved to tears in the moment that Herzog listens through headphones to the audio of Treadwell's mortal encounter with the grizzly that killed him and his girlfriend, and I relished the disappointment I felt that the actual audio track was not included in the film. The kind of unbridled total and complete graphic disclosure that we are accustomed to now in media was highlighted when I realized that it would not have added anything to the film had we actually sat through the actual recording of their deaths. It reminds me of why books are almost always better than their film adaptations, and why the mind's eye is often more powerful than any image a filmmaker can provide.