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Grizzly Man

It was not a surprise to most when Timothy Treadwell, a dreamy environmentalist, died at the hands of one of his beloved Grizzly bears after thirteen years of devotion and interaction with these rugged animals. In Werner Herzog’s new documentary Grizzly Man, we see Treadwell refer time and time again to the danger he faces as an unarmed human in the Alaskan wilds. He says things like “I am living in the most dangerous place any human has ever lived,” and “I realize that at any moment, it’s possible that these bears could decapitate me, or kill me, or eat me…if I wasn’t careful.” At the beginning of each summer, he tells his friends not to be sad if he doesn’t come back but to know that he died doing what he wanted to do. It is the combination of Treadwell’s apparent madness and a complete and abiding passion for his work that makes Grizzly Man an interesting portrayal of the lengths human beings go to truly feel fulfilled.

The documentary consists mainly of Treadwell’s footage, a raw hundred hours that director Werner Herzog cut down and spliced with interviews with friends of Treadwell’s and other various people who were somehow involved in his story (i.e. the coroner, the pilot who found his remains, etc). Treadwell is such an interesting character that we can’t look away. He narrates the bear’s activities and coos over them as if they are his children all while in perilous distance to these mammoth animals.

We never quite get the message about how exactly Timothy Treadwell is helping the bears by living up with them in Alaska, but it come across with astonishing clarity how the bears are helping him. Interviews with friends and family show that before his expeditions with the bears, Treadwell was troubled and alcoholic and disappointed in his failed attempts to make it as an actor. Yet, as Grizzly Man goes on, we can barely match the troubled boy that they describe with the film’s ebullient star. While watching him reporting on the bears during these Alaskan summers one gets the sense that his interaction with the animals has given him an enriched sense of his own existence as a human being and has even brought him from the precipice of ruin from drugs or alcohol

Treadwell, of course, ends up “ruined” anyways, but one gets the sense that his demise in Alaska is a less heart-breaking one than one suffered at the hands of his own depression. In a particularly touching scene, we see Treadwell on the brink of tears whispering earnestly “I would die for these animals, I would die for these animals, I would die for these animals.” This self-fulfilling prophecy becomes a tragedy soon enough but leaves the viewer with a meditation on the quality of human life that lasts long after the film has ended.

Written by: Jennifer O'Reilly

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