Grizzly Man

2005

Director Werner Herzog

If the tale of Timothy Treadwell was not so harrowing, one might be tempted to say that the perfect story had fallen right into Werner Herzog’s lap. This is, after all, a film director who has made a career out of exploring the dark, uncompromising relationship between man and nature in such unsettling features as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Cobra Verde (1987). Herzog would be the first to profess his love for all things natural, from the wind in the trees to the snake in the grass, and this tremulous affection is on full display in his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man.

In 2003, bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell and girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve. Using Treadwell’s own footage, as well as interviews with those who knew him best, Herzog attempts to unravel the myth of the man whose passion became his doom.

Respect surrounds Herzog’s representation of the bears. The camera holding close on some particularly furry features, Herzog muses, “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.” Herzog makes basic, fundamental points throughout, referring to the invisible yet incumbent line between man and nature, and the harsh, remorseless animal world. Here Herzog echoes the beautiful, poetic monologue delivered by Jeff Goldblum’s doomed Dr. Martin Brundle in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986): “Insects don’t have politics. They’re very brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can’t trust the insect.” Prior to Grizzly Man, this chilling, haunting speech was the perfect description of why we should respect the animal world. Not fear. Respect. To Herzog the difference is everything. This is about as judgmental as the veteran German filmmaker ever becomes. His deep admiration for Treadwell’s unwavering, unshakeable devotion to the bears and their way of life is clear, yet he cannot shake the obvious: Treadwell crossed a line that human beings should never pass, and it cost him not only his, but also Amie Huguenard’s, life.

It is when this mediatory, analytic mood is disrupted by a more elegiac one that the documentary’s most powerful moment occurs. Herzog speaks regularly to a former lover of Treadwell’s, the somewhat eccentric Jewell Palovak, a woman who has inherited much of her ex-boyfriend’s belongings, including the tape that recorded the sounds of the ill-fated attack. Previously convinced that such a recording belonged in his documentary, we are forced to watch, as Herzog himself dons the earphones. Only one side of his stoic visage is visible, as Palovak watches him intently. Within mere moments, Herzog asks her to turn it off. He is almost in tears. He tells her never to listen to it. To destroy it. The sight of a powerful, seemingly unflappable character such as Herzog so visibly shaken by what he just heard is the perfect embodiment of the power possessed by Grizzly Man.

**** ¼ / *****