There is something romantic about madmen, and German director Werner Herzog has fallen more than once – with characters like the mad 16th-century explorer in “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” and the loony entrepreneur “Fitzcarraldo,” who attempted to haul a steamboat up a mountain to bring opera singer Caruso to the Peruvian jungle.
Timothy Treadwell, the subject of the documentary “Grizzly Man” ($27.98) was a self- styled environmentalist who convinced himself he was protecting the giant beasts in the wilds of Alaska. To do this, Treadwell lived among them for some 13 years, filming thousands of hours of himself interacting with the grizzlies. Eventually, though, the then-46-
year-old onetime aspiring actor and his girlfriend met horrifying deaths in an encounter with a hungry grizzly. The only reason Treadwell had not been killed and eaten earlier, conjectured one observer in the film, may have been because the bears thought something was wrong with him.
“I will die for these animals” was the mantra repeated ad nauseam by Treadwell, who at times acted like he was Mr. Rogers and the bears harmless kiddies. But in the next breath, he’ll let you know of his bravery, telling you if he shows fear, “They will decapitate me, they will chop me into bits and pieces.” What’s obvious is that Treadwell never learned much about the animals he was supposedly protecting – preferring, it seemed, to mainly rely on his untrained observances, as if a little real knowledge would get in the way of him becoming one with the bears, which seemed to be his ultimate ambition.
To be fair, Herzog, who narrates the documentary, doesn’t fall head over heels for Treadwell’s reinvention from his directionless life to grizzly man. Herzog interviews a number of people who weigh in on Treadwell’s naivete. Among them was an Aleut spokesman who noted that the grizzlies and Aleutian Indians had co-inhabited the same area for centuries because they respected each other’s territory, and felt that Treadwell was causing harm by giving the bears the sense that all humans were friendly.
Another, a bear ecologist, contends that poaching wasn’t a problem in the area that Treadwell was “protecting,” which was already federally protected land. He admits that hunting is allowed to cull the population, but Treadwell in his filmed tirades builds the threat up to massive proportions.
Treadwell supporters who testify to his sincerity are also interviewed, but they are all caught up in his romantic image rather than having a sense of what he was accomplishing in the wilderness.
Pretending to be Dr. Doolittle was not merely an act of naivete but an egoistic death wish. While Herzog shows us the line Treadwell crossed between passion and madness, he also cuts Treadwell some slack, defending him – “as a filmmaker” – for some interesting shots of the bears he took and casting him at times as a man fleeing civilization to seek spiritual harmony with nature.
The dour Herzog, though, is mostly ambivalent about his exuberant subject but has produced a fascinating documentary. But “Grizzy Man,” which is appearing on many critics’ top-10 lists, can also seem like a bad joke.
In Treadwell you see the madness of someone dying to be recognized as someone special.
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