MOVIES: Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)

Herzog's documentary introduces us to Timothy Treadwell, who believed that the Alaskan grizzly bears needed his protection. It's not clear what he thought he was protecting them from, since they lived on a Federally protected wildlife preserve, but "protect" them he did, living among for thirteen summers. For five of those summers, he took a videocamera with him, filming over 100 hours of videotape.

One of Treadwell's favorite themes is how dangerous the bears are. Several times he tells us that despite his friendship with the bears, if he lets his guard down for even an instant, they might kill him. And at the end of his thirteenth summer in the Alaskan wilderness, that's exactly what happened: Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed and eaten by the bears.

Roughly half of Grizzly Man is made up of Treadwell's videotapes; he has a strong flair for the melodramatic, and is very concerned that his speeches to the camera come out just right, filming some speeches as many as a dozen times. He had, in fact, sought an acting career before going to Alaska; he was, according to his parents, narrowly beaten out by Woody Harrelson for a major part on Cheers, and never recovered from that failure.

The rest of the film is interviews with Treadwell's friends and family. (Huguenard's family chose not to cooperate with Herzog, and she is rarely present in Treadwell's tapes; all we really know of her is that she died with him.) The portrait of Treadwell that we get from those interviews is of a lonely man, so unable to find a place in the world that he retreated to the wilderness, adopting the bears as a surrogate family.

What seems clear to me is that Treadwell knew that his time among the bears would end as it did, and that on some level, he sought that ending. There's an odd gleam in his eye during his many "these bears could kill me" speeches, and his sadness as he leaves the bears each year goes beyond the sadness of someone leaving a place he loves; it is, I think, a deep depression at the thought that he's going to have to spend another year alive in a world that seems to have no place for him.

Grizzly Man is a painfully sad movie; we are, after all, watching Treadwell commit a slow, strange form of suicide, and he tragically took Huguenard with him. But Herzog, who has long been fascinated by madness and fatal obsessions, is the perfect director to tell Treadwell's story; he refuses to sentimentalize the story, or to make Treadwell a heroic figure. It's a riveting movie, and it's astonishing that it did not even make the list of fifteen finalists in the documentary category at this year's Oscars.