Grizzly Man

Timothy Treadwell lived among the bears in Katmai National Park, Alaska, and paid the price for forgetting the maxim "It's not smart to fuck with Mother Nature."

Seeing himself as a defender and even savior of the bears, he crossed a line one doesn't cross, disrespected the bears and the harsh laws governing the wild, and in so doing paid the ultimate price. Adding to the sadness of the situation is the fact that his girlfriend ended up being killed while trying to defend him from the attacking bear. (To make things sadder still, she was apparently about to break up with him.)

Fear not: master director Werner Herzog spares us such details as autopsy photos or the audio track from a video tape that was recording during the attack. Mostly, we see Timothy himself with interviews ranging from his friends and family to the coroner who examined his remains to experts who disagree with his type of approach.

Herzog does not stand back and adopt a studiedly neutral attitude toward Treadwell, but instead portrays him as a sad, self-involved, mixed-up soul who needed an escape. He needed to escape from a world in which he didn't fit. He also needed to escape into an obsession to replace his addiction to drugs and alcohol.

One can't avoid, while observing Treadwell's self-recorded videos, feeling sorry for a man who, although he seemingly believed himself to be sincere, was so obviously living a life as the proverbial "legend in his own mind." Most of his recordings are not so much about the bears as about Treadwell himself and his philosophy of relating to bears. One soon tires of hearing him use the words "I," "me," and "my" almost incessantly.

He makes such a point of portraying himself as heterosexual and brave and totally up to standing up to bears testing him (even describing himself as a "samurai" at one point), that one can't help but notice how effeminate he is and how frequently he preens his hair as he talks. It's easy to theorize that the poor guy was so deep in the closet that not even he realized his homosexuality. I have no conclusive proof to offer, but see if you don't draw the same conclusion. And it's not that I see anything wrong if this is the case, except that it fits in with his generally unrealistic view of the world to be in total denial over something so central to his interior life.

The brief interview with his parents reinforces this view because, believe me, they are David Lynch weird, especially his Grecian Formulaed father, who wore sunglasses indoors while being interviewed, and his teddy bear-hugging mother.

Werner Herzog is one of the great directors, who normally shoots very dramatic feature films. This film proves he's equally adept at documentaries.