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Review

Werner Herzog's compassionate documentary investigates the life and death of amateur filmmaker and sentimental naturalist Timothy Treadwell. The delicate treatment offers touching insight into the life of a man tormented by his past who found peace in Alaska's pristine wilderness. In Grizzly Man, Herzog interprets his own fears of nature through the burden of Treadwell's dreams, a vision that ultimately led to his untimely.

Herzog's restraint is admirable. Grizzly Man could have very easily been a grisly recounting of events, replete with the sordid details and sort of armchair psychiatry that are soft news boilerplate, presenting the wild imaginings of a madman possessed by his mania. But Herzog's approach doesn't judge Treadwell's foibles and he chooses instead to question his methods, allowing the audience to reach their own conclusions about Treadwell's behavior and decisions.

Herzog presents someone who, not unlike Klaus Kinski, was a man of intent and action, for whom consequences were secondary and of lesser importance. Through interviews with local experts who disagreed with Treadwell's tactics; who saw his interference with the animals as detrimental, and through conversations with his family and friends who saw him as a man wounded by societal priorities and unable to cope with conventional expectations, Herzog introduces Treadwell as a troubled, but compassionate person hoping to reinvent himself in solitude. Ultimately, with just a camera he has created a new, infallible image of himself as a naturalist and a folk hero.

Grizzly Man attempts to place Treadwell in the context of the misunderstood individual, with reservations. Herzog's enduring fear of nature's brutality present in his own work translates into a sophisticated understanding of Treadwell's countervailing obsession. However, where Treadwell saw beauty, Herzog sees danger, presenting the perfect counterpoint and a balanced understanding of the man and his life in an elegiac film that is as much a eulogy for Treadwell as it is for Alaska's ferocious beauty.

 -- J.T. Ramsay