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Grizzly Man August 28, 2005 |
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In Les Blank’s heroic jungle documentary “Burden of Dreams”, about German director Werner Herzog’s attempt to film an impossible boat-over-the-mountain moment deep in the unforgiving Peruvian jungle for his film “Fitzcarraldo”, Herzog, an eccentric auteur famous for his quirky yet profound examinations of strange men in extraordinary environments, becomes his own protagonist; a half insane, half brilliant explorer of the filmic medium who puts his crew, and his sanity, to the brink for the better of his unique vision. Herzog went into the jungle, railed against the cruel elements of nature, somehow got that huge boat over the mountain, and came away with a film fascinating in and of itself for the spectacle of that moment, but Blank, in turn, captured an even better phenomenon in “Burden of Dreams”, Werner Herzog being Werner Herzog, controlling, petulant, philosophical, demanding, strange, genius, and master of a medium stretched to impossible limits for the hypnotic beauty of the moment. “Fitzcarraldo” is one of Herzog’s best films, and “Burden of Dreams” is one of the great movies about moviemaking, and they are both available on DVD, but here they serve me well as an introduction into Herzog’s new film, “Grizzly Man”, a documentary similar in vein to “Burden of Dreams”, except that its star, Timothy Treadwell (but by turns, Herzog as narrator is his equal), is two-years dead, and Herzog, as supreme storyteller, makes no bones about it, for it is the focus of the piece, not how, but why, and what drove Treadwell, a troubled middle-aged ex-actor, to drop out of society to live with the very dangerous grizzly bears on the Alaskan forest preserve. Like “Burden of Dreams”, the director as documentarian goes into the jungle (forest in this case, by way of hours upon hours of Treadwell’s footage), questions the sanity of his strange and utterly convicted subject, makes a few judgments of his own, and comes away with a film both sad and self reflexive; a filmmaker piecing together the broken bits of another filmmaker’s tragic demise, such a demise, some might have predicted for Herzog himself, all those years ago in the jungles of Peru. “Grizzly Man” is epic in scope, molding the found footage of Timothy Treadwell, a blonde haired, hyper active nature environmentalist, and part time self aggrandizing wacko, who was killed and eaten by an angry black bear after 12 peaceful “expeditions”, into a study of nature as both entity and supreme giver (and taker) of life, and a psychological mystery into Treadwell’s disturbed mind. “In the astonishing beauty and depth of his films,” narrates Herzog in his charming, heavy German accent, “lies dormant a story.” The story isn’t so much the 13 years Treadwell spent living in close proximity to the bears, giving them names, watching them fight, and loving them like he was part of their family, or the gold mine of nature photography he took during those years, which indeed are inherently gorgeous, but more the story of Treadwell’s own rationalizing with nature, his own understanding that if he’s careful, and nice, to the bears, they’d permit him his existence there, and why, near the end of his 13th expedition, he and a girlfriend stayed on longer than scheduled, eventually being mauled to death by an unforgiving old bear, while his regular, friendlier bears were hibernating for the winter. The mission, to show the world the dangers of poaching, and the importance of nature preservation, is ultimately lost by Treadwell’s insane ravings, but Herzog sympathizes with the cause, and the man’s friends who stood by him, but the director doesn’t agree with Treadwell’s notions about the kindness of nature, what Herzog deems an “overwhelming indifference” to nature’s cruelties. “It is the same kind of madness,” sums up Herzog, in a striking simile, “that cast Thoreau out of Walden.” Treadwell fits firmly into the Herzog canon of deranged, powerful men who face life threatening hardships in foreign territory (“Stroszek”, “Fitzcarraldo”, “The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser”, “Aguirre: The Wrath of God”), but his story is made all the more poignant, as is the case with all good documentaries, with interviews of people related to the case, who further deepen the mystery of Treadwell’s dangerous obsession. Herzog talks to the helicopter pilot who found Treadwell’s barely recognizable body, the coroner who describes in shocking detail how the bear ripped apart his skull (all caught on audio, which we never hear, thankfully), Treadwell’s parents who recall a troubled alcoholic confused about how to live his life, his former lover and best friend who delivers a touching monologue about Timothy’s spirited personality, and a nature expert who sympathizes with the subject’s demise, but not his rationalization. “You don’t invade on their territory, it’s an unspoken boundary,” says the man about the relationship between man and beast, “an unknown boundary, and when we’ve crossed it, we know we’ve paid the price.” In a classic episode of “The Simpsons”, the family gets lost in the woods and a pack of grizzly bears befriend Maggie after she lends the baby grizzly her beloved pacifier. Such is the reality of a cartoon, and it’s charmingly funny, but such is the reality of non-fiction, that in Treadwell’s cartoonish mind, he was one of the bears, co-existing with the foxes and insects like he belonged, and for Herzog, and his remarkably poignant “Grizzly Man”, that lost dance with nature is a baffling, unnecessary loss of life. One man’s death is another man’s great movie, but like many things in life, it’s just not that simple. “Grizzly Man” is playing at the Amherst Theater, 3500 Main St. in Buffalo. by Adam Suraf
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