Werner Herzog: Grizzly Man (2005)

Werner Herzog: Grizzly Man (2005)

An important lesson about man and nature

Review by Chris Knipp

For thirteen years "grizzly man" Timothy Treadwell went to an Alaskan wildlife refuge on Kodiak Island and pitched his tent alone -- and the last couple of times with a girlfriend (Amy Huguenard) -- spending the summers among huge grizzly bears. The rest of the year he went to schools and "free of charge" showed his films of the bears and his exploits. When the last of his summers drew to a close he and his girlfriend died among the grizzlies as he'd always known -- and even David Letterman had pointed out -- that he might. Filmmaker Werner Herzog, longtime student of crazy eccentric loners on heroic doomed quests, has taken on Treadwell's life and personality as the subject of a rare and powerful documentary.

At the heart of Grizzly Man are Herzog's selective cullings from film Treadwell left behind chronicling both the bears and -- with poignancy and openness -- his own demons, passions, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. Herzog has added interviews with women in Treadwell's life, with his parents, with the pilot who took him to and from his campgrounds and later found his and his girlfriend's remains, and with Franc Fallico, the unusually sympathetic and sensitive -- and perhaps a bit looney -- coroner who examined these. The director has bound it all together with his own frank and idiosyncratic narration. The result is a rare sober look at the more delusional aspects of man's relations to wild animals.

At times Herzog by implication sympathetically links Treadwell with his former principle star and sparring partner, the late mad eccentric actor Klaus Kinski. Like Kinski Treadwell had tantrums on a film set. But his set was the outdoors and there was no director to spar with; his sparring partners were nature and his own troubled psyche. Nature contained, of course, living witnesses, chief among them the grizzly bears he knows can kill him. He repeatedly tells the camera how much he loves them. He loves the gentler, smaller foxes near whose dens he pitches his tents during the second halves of his summer sojourns. He tells the camera you must be firm with the bears, and he says he knows how to handle them, even though he also repeatedly says he knows he may die there.

He is a gambler. Is he a complex man, or merely a confused one? Is he brave, or just foolhardy? What is his purpose in spending all this time among the grizzlies? Is he gathering information, or taking refuge among creatures he need not please, only keep a safe distance from (though he continually comes closer to bears than the park rules and good sense require)? He has a soft sissified manner and voice and even says he wishes he were gay. But he also rants and rages embarrassingly and tiresomely against unseen enemies, poachers, sightseers, rangers, hunters, park officials, the whole urban settled world he runs from to this world he idealizes and blindly sees as perfect.

As Herzog notes, Treadwell sought to disregard nature's cruelty, and any time it was in his face -- as when the bears were starving in a dry spell and began eating their own young -- he sought to manipulate nature to eliminate the ugliness. He faulted not the bears but the rain gods. Then when his atheist's prayers are answered and torrential rains do in fact come, Treadwell is comic -- not for the first time -- trapped for days in his collapsed tent.

Young Timothy according to his parents was an ordinary boy who loved animals from childhood and got a diving scholarship to college. But he injured his back and quit college and he drank and when he went to LA to act and didn't get a part on Cheers he "spiraled down." He never had a lasting relationship with a woman and the drinking became serious and constant. In vain he tried programs, meetings, self-discipline -- but the drinking went on and was killing him. Finally he got sober for the grizzlies and the foxes. He decided to devote his life to them and he pledged to them that he would be clean and healthy. It was a miracle. Yet he remained not only manic-depressive but passive-aggressive, as his constant on-camera alternations between gentle declarations of love of the animals and his spewing of vitriol against the civilized world attest.

Treadwell's soft-voiced declarations of love and sweetness among the grizzlies would be beautiful -- if such behavior, in a world of extreme physical risk, surrounded by limber lumbering beasts with great teeth and long claws, while preening for the camera with caps and bandanas and golden locks in a dozen alternate takes -- were not criminally silly and irresponsible. Herzog hides none of this in his portrait, which is both sympathetic and ruthless.

As the years passed the Grizzly Man found transitions back to civilization harder and harder to make. On the last occasion, an airport official infuriated him by questioning the validity of his ticket and he turned around with his girlfriend -- who was afraid of bears! -- and returned to the "maze," the most dangerous of his summer campgrounds because it wasn't in the open where the bears could see him and steer clear but among their burrows and the brush. It was later than he ever stayed and the bears he knew and had names for were hibernating now, replaced by new unknown and more hostile and nasty animals. He must also have been more desperate, perhaps more careless? We see the bear that probably devoured him and poor Amy.

Herzog has access to everything, even an audio-only tape of Timothy and Amy's truly grizzly death. He spares us, though. He didn't want to make a snuff film.

As Herzog begins his film by stating, Timothy Treadwell crossed a line between wild animal and human that should never be crossed. It's a line many touchy-feely "nature" and "wildlife" films also cross: see the recent March of the Penguins and you'll have a prime example. Grizzly Man isn't meant to be about grizzlies. It's about men who cross that line -- who willfully misunderstand nature for their own misguided reasons, to serve their own dysfunctional needs. A depressing but important film.


Posted on Chris Knippwebsite.

I think that Herzog found a kindered spirit in Treadwell. They were both lunatics willing to go out in the wild (Herzog in the jungle, Treadwell in the maze) and for the sake of their art. But as Herzog mentions the key difference between them is that he blieves the world thrives on chaos, wheras Treadwell believes that there is harmony and balance. I believe that Herzog uses his ideology to somewhat slant the film. Had Treadwell not had such an ironic death, then perhaps we might agree more with his views, but the simple fact that very bears he was trying to protect were the cause of his death, Herzog can't resist knowing that he's right.

The footage used of Treadwell is hardly polished. Herzog is content to show you all the alternate takes, the empty shots, the dizzying shots of Timothy running with a camera. He is not out to make a sleek observational nature film (ala Penguins), instead he wants to show the unseen beauty in film, and in particular Treadwell's films. He believes there is something in his films that perhaps he wasn't even aware was there. A short take of the wind blowing trees, or a short shot of a fox on his tent.

Timothy Treadwell is a tragic figure in many ways. Sure he knew what he was getting into and that the bears could kill him at any moment, and many anti-environmentalists will point and laugh at him for being a dumb ass to go out there in the first place. Yet it is what drives him out there. The harshness of man, his absense of real human interaction. His problems with women in particular. There is an identity problem, hence the story of his Australian heritage that he made up. He is finding himself in the wild though, and more and more he is finding that's where he wants to be. Free from other people who obviously don't seem to understand him.

I'll possibly add more later, but well sometimes too much reading can cause your pupils to dialate.

I think I covered most of what you said. But your way of defining the key difference between Timothy and Werner is odd. It's more nature as benign vs. nature as hostile. Treadwell's pretense of a tame and friendly bear is false and dangerous. His behavior ultimately could make an anti-environmentalist of anyone. "Treadwell is a tragic figure in many ways." Really is that all you can come up with? It's more complex than that. Watch it again.

"Had Treadwell not had such an ironic death, then perhaps we might agree more with his views." No. But Herzog would not have made a film.

I found the guy pathetic. No friends in the real world, so he had to travel to Alaska and live with Bears to feel love. Sure there were some people that he interacted with in the "human world", but he remains tragic in my eyes. I just think Treadwell is looking for something to define himself. The film is a search for who he really is, and as Herzog I believe concluded, nobody really knows the real Timothy. The character is complicated, and Treadwell believes he is finding himself out in the wilderness.

I think the key to his personality comes when one of his friends tells about when they tried to medicate him for his bi-polar disorder. Treadwell can't take the medicine because "I need the highs, as well as the lows". He remains a man of extremes.

I was slightly surprised that Herzog left the audio of his death out of the film. I know most directors would have avoided it, but I thought Herzog was the envelope pusher that would have subjected us to that painfully uncomfortable piece of audio. The person I went with was actually a little disappointed that we didnt' get to hear it. I for one was glad, that would have been a little too much, and as you said, it would have made it a snuff film and more sensationalist.

Still enjoyed the film a hell of a lot however. As far as seeing it again, that probably won't happen for a damn long time. It was a one hour drive just to get to this theater, and I got much more to see.

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I found the guy pathetic. No friends in the real world, so he had to travel to Alaska and live with Bears to feel love. Sure there were some people that he interacted with in the "human world", but he remains tragic in my eyes.

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I don't question your basic reading of the film, but since there are important differences between tragic and pathetic that these comments somewhat blur, I still prefer my word, tragi-comic. "No friends in the real world" is also an overstatement which the interviews with several very devoted friends belie (remember the actor). He undoubtedly had trouble succeeding in any work or fitting in in the world, it's true. But friends he did have.

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The character is complicated, and Treadwell believes he is finding himself out in the wilderness.

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Certainly true, but what makes this a great film is that Herzog is partly finding himself too, so we are actually finding both men through Grizzly Man.

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With the narrowing gap between theater and DVD release, your wait for a second viewing may not be such a "damn long time."

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As I should have said perhaps, but left out for the sake of simplicity, "We're not going to make a snuff movie" was what Herzog said in an interview , not my personal choice of words. Herzog's use of the audio-only tape of Tim and Amy's death is considerably more significant and germane to Herzog's concerns than merely hearing the tape would be. We've heard people groan and wail before. In the scene, he listens to the tape with Treadwell's closest female friend, and then says he thinks she should dispose of it. This is such an important moment that it is the only time we get a glimpse of Herzog himself. The exchange in this LATimes interview contextualizes the tape data in a more complex way than the mere audio would:

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Q: Had you done that before, interjected yourself into a film?

A: Not to such a degree. In this case, I did not want to appear in person in the movie with the exception of one key moment where I'm listening to the tape [an audiotape of Treadwell and Huguenard's final moments as they're being attacked by a bear]. I was allowed to listen to the tape, and it was instantly clear: We're not going to make a snuff movie. It's not going to be in the film. And, actually, I'm not important in this moment. You see me from the back with earphones on. But you see the face of the woman who owns the tape who was very close to Treadwell. She's trying to read my face. [She has never heard the tape.] Like almost a mirror image of my face and the anguish on her face. It [the scene] has great intensity and great anguish.

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This is also another comment on your statement, "No friends in the real world." I recommend this interview, as a valuable commentary on Herzog's intentions and his experience in making the film.

The no friends comment was more from Treadwell's perspective. Yes we talked to people who cared about him, but he had a self appointed image as a loner in the wilderness, hence the reason he never even included any of his occasional companions in his film. HE doesn't seem to acknowledge these people who do care about him.

What I mean about a long time before seeing it again, I still have several thousand movies I've never seen once, so the priority of Grizzly Man on a second viewing isn't very high.

All we know of Treadwell's point of view is in the film, which points out he depicts himself as alone to appear, in Herzog's words, "the lone warrior" or "the lone ranger," even when his girlfriend was there with him; to dramatize his role and make it seem heroic, to be a star. But while some rangers saw him as crazy or retarded, there is nowhere in Grizzly Man that depicts T.T. as either being or seeing himself as actually friendless. Hope you looked at the Herzog interview. Or another one; there are many. One thing Herzog makes clear in the film and interviews is that Amy was prepared to die to defend Timotny, even though she was on the point of breaking up with him. So she was a friend, and more than a friend, though Herzog says in another interview she had accused him fo being "hellbent for destruciton." He had trouble maintaining lasting relationships with women but he clearly bonded with them deeply. We don't know that he never acknowledged them, just because he edited them out of his "heroic" footage of himself in the wilds. To say that he had no friends or claimed to have no friends is not justified by the content of the film.

Excellence, guys.

Really looking forward to this.

Herzog is a God to me, and his White Diamond is something I'm dying to see. It plays here at the VIFF in Oct.

I was gonna see White Diamond, but found out the DVD is coming out next month, so I'll wait.

"Grizzly man" Timothy Treadwell fits rather snugly among the protagonists of Werner Herzog's films_real people like woodcarver and ski-flyer Walter Steiner and Dieter Dengler, who came close to being attacked by a "beautiful bear" in a Laos jungle; or fictional characters such as Don Lope Aguirre and Bruno Stroszek. Herzog has been fascinated for decades with obsessed, delusional, death-defying oddballs. Yet, to this viewer, the strongest character correlation is not with any other Herzog subject but with Jonathan Caouette, the writer/director/protagonist of Tarnation.

Both Treadwell and Caouette are self-exposing, recovered substance abusers who cultivate a drama-queen persona and have achieved notoriety through video confessionals. This association is probably due to the fact that about half of Grizzly Man consists of footage taken by Treadwell himself, footage that has a strong fictional element. Faced with his failure to get a part in somebody else's movie or TV show, Threadwell created a role for himself based on his passion for wild animals, bears in particular. It's a part he played for about 10 weeks per year, we know very little about what he was like when he wasn't playing this death-defying loner out on remote Alaska.

Another personal reaction to the film consists of viewing it as a case history on bipolar disorder_the term "manic-depressive" is infinitely more descriptive yet obsolete. Treadwell exhibits all the classic symptoms of the disorder. He has decided not to treat it because he "needs the highs and lows", and that's his right. I can't help to think of his coming into proximity with unfamiliar, more aggressive bears as the type of impulsive behavior that a moderate dosage of medication might have prevented, but I'm aware this is pure conjecture on my part.

I would like to point out that I think the review by Chris Knipp is one of his best of the year_one can't possibly describe a bear in three words better than "limber lumbering beasts". My comments are relatively brief because I don't want to be redundant and restate something Knipp already said. I wish he'd expand on his considering the film or the lesson of the film "important", and I know he would if he wasn't extremely busy watching and reviewing films at the NYFF right now. I found the alluded lesson too obvious and the single-oddball subject too narrow to refer to Herzog's excellent and engaging doc as "important", but I remain open to any arguments to the contrary.

I never thought about the Tarnation reference, but now that you mention it, there is definately a correlation.

Man attempting to surmount nature, and failing miserably, has long been an obsession of German filmmaker/documentarian Werner Herzog -- his work during the 70's most ardently dealt with that. In his latest effort, Grizzly Man, Herzog has found a way to retread the concept through Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent 13 summers in the Alaskan nature preserve, often breaking laws in order to get closer to the grizzly bears he apparently cared for. The documentary consists of excerpts from the over 100 hours of footage Treadwell mostly shot himself over the course of 5 summers before him and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed by one of the bears in October, 2003. (I won’t get into other details since Chris has done a good job above.)

Early on in the film, it’s hard not to sympathize with Treadwell and his passion, but slowly and surely, it becomes apparent that he wanted recognition (not fame, necessarily). It’s obvious to me that his accomplishment led him to believe that he’s superior to other humans in a way ("You won’t fucking survive here like I did," he once says looking directly into the camera), something he always aimed for, rather than it allowed him to strive to "become a bear," which is what we hear from various "professionals."

Having said that, we need to be careful regarding making an ultimate judgment. After all, Herzog has given us only a few minutes of, as I mentioned earlier, over 100 hours of footage. What we watched fitted well with Herzog’s overall agenda. It’s quite possible that if another documentarian would’ve taken on the subject, we’d be discussing something different. Still, in this doc, which is overall well put together, Herzog’s should’ve dug deeper into Treadwell’s contentious relationship with Huguenard, which we discovered through his diary entries. The bear who killed them (and then later got shot) was provided more attention than the girl.

And Herzog’s penchant for details of their gory deaths was primarily incorporated in order to go around what he didn’t wanted to do: let us hear the audio tape. I have mixed feeling on that. Is it more "noble" to have an overly excited forensic-embalmer(?) explain how the bear tore into Treadwell’s skull, or would Herzog have been able to make his obvious point by employing an artistic means? I recall Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s mastery of sound editing in the anthology titled 11'09''01 - September 11 (2002) in which his segment simply consisted of screams of people jumping from the buildings after the attack. It was a moving and devastating account and not simply a technical showcase. But if Herzog was going to stay away from the sounds, then he shouldn’t have tried to recreate a scene where he listens to the tape and then informs Treadwell’s former girlfriend to throw it away. It teases us more than anything else. Not good.

However, what follows is the film’s most astonishing and, to some, possibly disturbing scene: Two bears fight it out for the "Michelle Pfeiffer of bears," as Treadwell later notes. Herzog rightfully remains quiet during the sequence, which culminates with his protagonist recognizing the laws of nature while sitting not far away for the fallen bear. This is where Treadwell feels like a human being, one who’s brave enough to be right there. (He also spoke about the possibility of his death on numerous occasions; practically he knew that his end would be through the animals he loved most.)

The filmmaker’s best moments, however, do comprise of his commentary, at times running along Treadwell’s. Herzog doesn’t allow us to make a connection between his subject here and his "favorite" actor Klaus Kinski -- he makes it himself: "[Treadwell]’s rage is almost incandescent, artistic. The actor in his film has taken over from the filmmaker. I have seen this madness before on the film set." This was after Treadwell’s profanity-laden rant against the Alaskan park services. (The disappointing part is that the bears were doing perfectly fine. There are many, many other species out there that could’ve used him.) And then later on, it’s Treadwell who provides him with the close-up of a bear’s face, making Herzog conclude 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."

Nature is cruel. Most of us recognize that, I think. But it’s also beautiful and majestic. While the focus here is certainly on the former, Herzog duly notes that Treadwell’s images, unwittingly, often consisted of the lush green hills and valleys in the region, not to mention the rivers and the lakes that surrounded them. But ultimately the filmmaker believes that the common denominator here is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder. Looking at the direction we seem to be headed in, he just might be right.


Grizzly Man - Grade: B

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*The doc is currently in theaters. It will available on DVD on Dec 27th.

I'm just now getting gack to this thread. I must not be subscribed to it.

Belated thanks to Oscar for his extravagantly kind words about my review. It's been a while and many other movies since I saw Grizzly Man, but I definitely think it's one of the best documentaries of this year or any year in recent memory. This is not so much for the beauty of the footage or the brilliance of the construction, as for the importance of the ideas contained therein, and Herzog's honesty and presence. There is the "fly on the wall" kind of documentary, and of recent ones I'd say Être et avoir/To Be and to Have is the best example of that I can cite; and there is the openly committed and directly, personally involved kind, of which the best recent example is My Architect. Herzog's Grizzly Man is of the second kind. Yes, Herzog felt a kinship with Treadwell, but he also saw that Treadwell was seriously deluded and his purpose in Grizzly Man is to tell the story of this delusion and its tragic consequences. arsaib makes this clear when he says "Early on in the film, it’s hard not to sympathize with Treadwell and his passion, but slowly and surely, it becomes apparent...." -- and he thereafter explains that Treadwell wanted fame and had delusions of grandeur in ways that, by implication, we can't sympathize with. I differ with arsaib on some points, but we're together on this.

Later it becomes clear that arsaib has lost sight of the most important issue in the whole film: that of Treadwell's anthromorphizing and cutesyfying bears, which are not our friends, not domestic animals, and very dangerous to be around. Herzog is clear and emphatic about his stand on this, that nature in the wild is alien and dangerous to man, and that Treadwell was living and promulgating a lie. Let me be clear about myself: I agree. I personally have no sympathy for people who romanticize nature. arsaib takes note of a duality in nature ("Nature is cruel...But it is also beautiful and majestic") but he doesn't make clear what the film is ultimately about, namely the failure to deal appropraitely with nature and to recognize its dangers.

This is why I brought in the comparison with March of the Penguins, an example of what I call the "touchy feely" approach to nature, and the anthropmorphizing of alien creatures. I've heard that the sentimental US narration differs starkly from the French one on this, but I haven't heard the French one so I can't say. Certainly the footage of March of the Penguins itself is remarkable; it's the narration that is offensive. It may not be so dangerous to pet a penguin or get close to one, I don't know. But the Penguin film at least with the US narration fails to adequately acknowledge how alien they are to us and how hostile and dangerous to us is the environment in which they live.

I think arsaib is on the wrong track in implying that Herzog failed to investigate Treadwell's relationship with his girlfriend in enough detail and that doing so would somehow have made his documentary about the Grizzly Man significantly different. It's pretty clear that Treadwell provided very scant information about anyone other than himself and the bears and there's no reason to assume there are some key secrets about the relationship with the woman that are lurking there, waiting to create a very different documentary. Herzog was made to make this documentary, and Treadwell was made to be his subject. It seems very odd, not to say dense, to speculate that somebody else might make a better, or even significantly different, documentary about the same subject. All one could expect from another filmmaker would be a more watered-down version, probably one with a more limited perspective. Oscar is right in commenting that Treadwell is a psychological type, and one could look at him from the bi-polar standpoint; but that would still be a part of what Herzog already takes account of in his film, though he focuses elsewhere -- as did Treadwell.

In fact if arsaib recalls, we do hear part of the audio tape of Treadwell's and his girlfriend's deaths. We just don't hear it down to the grim finale. Why doing so would somehow be essential and revelatory and not just gruesome is a point that elludes me. Herzog's intervention with the lady and assertion that she should destroy the tape I think is a very moral thing and one of the film's finest moments, though it may be hard to understand at first. Overall, the idea that Herzog could have studied a hundred hours of video and somehow come up with odd conclusions others would not agree with seems also quite odd to me. The tapes of Treadwell speak for themselves. They cover a wide range of behaviors and moods. There's little reason to suppose that the nature of the videos has been distorted by Herzog's choices.

I think these points about the death tape and Treadwell's relationship with Amie Huguenard are side issues; not only are the questions about Herzog's treatment of them relatively unimportant quibbles, but they lead arsaib away from the central ideas of the film. And this is a film about ideas. To expand on my point as Oscar requests about the lesson of the film being "important": our falsifying of nature can be taken further -- to this present government's falsifying of the dangers to the environment of ignoring the effects of human pollution. If the planet is being allowed to devolve and our coastlines and cities and the health of our grandchildren are all in very serious jeopardy, this is in a sense a consequence of the view that nature is benign. If it's benign, it will take care of itself; we don't have to worry about it. Likewise if it is wonderfully noble and powerful, it will take care of itself. But unfortunately both ideas are now false: nature is not benign -- it never has been. And it is not so powerful that humans cannot do irreparable damage to the planet. They have done so. Or at least, the damage is beginning to look more and more like it could be irreparable. Even if the planet can be saved -- admittedly a hubristic and mistaken notion, because we don't know what the future holds for it; but we can try -- the extent of the alterations that have taken place demonstrably as a result of human activities is now so great, that we are going to have to suffer a lot of damage to our lifestyles and to our habitations.

Again, I still conclude, from the perspective of some months since my original viewing of it, that this is a very fine film. I have the greatest respect for my colleague arsaib's judgment, his ability as a writer of reviews, and his extensive knowledge of the movies, but nonetheless in this case I have to disagree strongly; hence I find arsaib's grading it with a mediocre "B" unjustifiable. If I gave grades to filmmakers or films, I'd give it and Werner Herzog an A+ for Grizzly Man and still consider that an understatement.

I’m surprised you haven’t noticed by now that, unlike others, I try my best to not go over the same content if I make to make a post on a film that’s already been covered (besides Grizzly Man, my post on A History of Violence is also an example of that). So, I didn’t lose sight of the most important, and obvious, issue in the entire film.

As I said earlier, Herzog picked and chose what fitted snugly in his overall scheme of things. But he had to bring up Huguenard because, after all, she died with Treadwell. Don’t assume that he provided little info about their contentious relationship; it’s Herzog who’s in control here. Going further with this would not create a different doc -- I think it would create an even more meaningful one.

You might agree that I didn’t imply that Treadwell’s end on the audio tape was "essential and revelatory"; I simply explained an example of another way it could’ve been approached. But I strongly disagree that the dramatized scene between Herzog and Treadwell’s former girlfriend is "one of the film’s finest moments."

My review is a positive one, as my grade indicates. But I believe that Herzog's recent work has been overrated by many (I haven’t yet seen The White Diamond).

I see your point of view and way of operating, but I still don't agree with your evaluation even though it is positive. I'm very up on this movie.