Grizzly Man Release Date: August 12, 2005 Starring: Timothy Treadwell, Amie Huguenard Directed by: Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog
PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/5/05)
By now it’s clear that visionary German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s fascination with madness isn’t a morbidly voyeuristic tendency. It’s a tool by which he staves off his own madness, perhaps; in any case, as an artist, Herzog serves as a kind of ambassador of madness, as embodied by a series of fictional and real-life characters and/or events. Herzog’s latest documentary, Grizzly Man, takes on the strange case of Timothy Treadwell, whom we first see talking into a video camera while a couple of honest-to-God grizzly bears go about their ursine chores mere yards behind him. Coming on like a refugee from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure-turned-naturalist or some such thing, Treadwell trumpets his ability to live among the bears—he spent 13 summers in Alaska doing that self-same thing, and chronicling those summers on video—and his willingness to die protecting them. How much protecting he did in an already federally protected wildlife preserve is open to question, but Treadwell surely did die among the bears. By one bear’s hands, to be specific. Employing oodles of Treadwell footage (in which he pretty much mentally and emotionally disintegrates before your eyes), sometimes deliberately stagy interviews, an earthy and eerie score by Richard Thompson, and his own dry but strangely impassioned narration, Herzog not only tells an incredible story but implies a dark metaphysic of the natural world that makes this film unsettlingly larger than its human subject.—Glenn Kenny
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