Tuesday, May 30, 2006

GRIZZLY MAN (2005) – A Movie Review

One of the recurrent themes in Werner Herzog’s work is extreme obsession. The Klaus Kinski characters in AGUIRRE and FITZCARRALDO are good examples. Herzog’s own documentary MY BEST FIEND about his troubled relationship with Kinski the actor demonstrates some sort of an obsession of Herzog’s to risk the dangerous fire of Kinski to produce a greater work of art. That said, I don’t know how the 100 hours of videotape shot by grizzlyman Timothy Treawell wound up in the hands of Herzog, but there is hardly another filmmaker could have gotten more out of it.

A lot of documentaries try to refrain from editorializing the lives of their main characters with their own voice. They usually do so through their use of footage. Herzog is different. He develops strong opinions of what he’s seen and he delivers those thoughts at the end as if he were just another audience member watching these things unfold with us.

I think the typical and weaker choice with this material would have been to paint Treadwell as a misunderstood, ahead-of-his-time outsider. If portrait documentaries fall into any particular cliché then this is it. The filmmakers are so many times dying to tell you why their subject is enlightened and unusual in the ways of the world as we know it. Even if we don’t like their subject, we’re made to admit that he is a mad genius at the least. Herzog makes the stronger choice here of plainly saying that Treadwell read benevolence and reciprocal caring into an indifferent animal that only saw him as food. He does so over a close-up shot of a bear giving us a blank stare. Treadwell loved the Bears and the bears merely tolerated him until the fish ran out.

I also like that Herzog traces Treadwell back to his acting ambitions and failures that seem to leave the man as a wannabee Marlin Perkins soap boxing to save animals that aren’t really in the kind of danger he suggests. It removes any myth that the guy was any kind of singular phenomenon, but a regular guy driven by an obsession that costs him the ultimate price.

Herzog has in his possession a video tape of Treadwell and his girlfriend being mauled and eaten by the bear. He tells us that the attack happened so quickly that Treadwell gets the camera turned on, but he doesn’t remove the dust cap in time so that all you can hear is the yelling and the girlfriend pounding the bear with a frying pan before she too succumbs to his appetite. Instead of playing the audio, Herzog plays this tape wearing headphones in front of Treadwell’s friend and heir. He gives her play by play of what he hears and then gives her the tape and suggests that she never listen to it and that she should destroy it. Even if the tape was hard to understand, hardly a filmmaker would have missed the exploitive choice to play it for us. Herzog instead inserts himself into the drama and puts the moral question to Treadwell’s friend. It’s troublesome because it seems a bit staged, but what he tries to do dramatically by passing the dilemma to her is an interesting idea.

One running theme from Treadwell’s discussion with the camera is that he loves the bears to the point that he would never hurt them and he’s prepared to die for them. He’s obsessed with anyone else who comes within his sphere and when some men do, he convinces himself that he is all that stands between the man and the animal. And as Treadwell fails to become the martyr from hunters after years in the attempt, he begins to suggest that he’ll be just as much a martyr if he dies at the hand of the animals themselves. It’s just the kind of illogical and obsessive idea that must have drawn Herzog to the project. Treadwell’s obsession with martyrdom means he will get there anyway he can. So Herzog uses interviews and the footage to show how Treadwell changed his mind and returned to the wilderness in 2003 past his usual time into the fall where the bears that knew him were in hibernation and strange bears fighting for a short food supply would be even more dangerous. He then gives us Treadwell’s last standup hours before his death in which he alludes to his possible death and kind if lingers on camera past his purpose like a man might stare one last time at his wife before going to war.

Instead of falling into the dramatic trap that it all has to have some meaning, Herzog goes to lengths to show us that his death was probably purposeful and entirely meaningless or just the opposite of the obsessive plan. Herzog does not let stand any pretense that the mauling had meaning outside of his friends that are sad that he is gone. His choice as a filmmaker made me re-evaluate how other people’s stories are fed through the documentary machine to create heroes and strange charming characters. GRIZZLY MAN, if nothing else, will change the way I examine other nonfiction films.

2 comments:

Dude said...

Boy, Tom, you nailed this one. While not an overtly great film, there is some key insight in GRIZZLY MAN that makes it extremely interesting. Herzog does not give us the standard film of a misunderstood hero who dies for his worthy cause. Herzog shows us a cause invented by a doofus with not much else to live for who chronicles his own misguided will to death.

I really like the outtakes of Treadwill's that are included in the film. Treadwill's footage was a product of the fantasy he was living in which people might actually care about what he was doing. In reality, there was no television studio waiting to receive his footage. It merely became a curiosity following his death which lead to this documentary.

It was good of him to capture his own death on camera since that is where the story was heading the whole while and it would have been tragically incomplete without that closure. In fact, there is no documentary here if Treadwill doesn't get eaten by bears on camera. Otherwise, the park ranger tosses the camcorder in the bin or takes it home to his kids after filing his report.

While ostensibly narrating his own trials of protecting the bears from unenlightened humans, Treadwill can't help constantly veering off into confessions of how lonely he is and how his life was mired with failure until he found his true calling. We the audience see that even his true calling is a failure, since the only nobility in it at all is removing himself from the gene pool.

Herzog has to look long and hard for anyone remotely interested in the guy enough to accept the wristwatch salvaged from his half-eaten arm. The woman cries, not for losing Treadwell, but likely at the notion of receiving such a grisly prize.

We all have but one life to give. I suppose there is an argument for choosing a cause for which to give it. Heck, at least he will be remembered for something in death, which was more than he accomplished in life.

E said...

Tom, another terrific piece of writing. Insightful, vivid, and stimulating.

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