Grizzly Man Review
By Colton Gomez | 04/18/24 | 11:09 P.M. Mountain Time
Documentary, Drama | Rated R | 1 hr 40 min | Film Release Date: August 12, 2005
Timothy Treadwell’s life was a search for belonging. He wanted to be someplace that accepted him and full of people that he accepted. He never found that in the civilized world. A couple of people would become close friends with Timothy, but his chosen family was the grizzlies. He was a man who despised modern society and craved the wilderness of Alaska, where he was free to be himself and free of social burdens. He craved a simpler, peaceful existence, but seemed to forget that nature is a harsh, cruel, indifferent, and unforgiving world of its own. Werner Herzog’s film details this experience in an extremely masterful portrait of the Grizzly Man.
Treadwell treated his summers in Alaska as his sanctuary from humanity’s civilized world. He claimed to love it all, even as his tent had fallen over due to a high wind rainstorm. He saw several familiar creatures such as Spirit, the fox. He petted the fox, and it would often come up to greet him, although one fox did steal his hat. He hoped to escape to Alaska to feel peace and be amongst his wild bear friends. But he was brought down from his high hopes at times, when he would see carcasses of a bear cub and young fox. He despaired that a cub was killed by its father, or that a different cub was killed by its mother, so it could cannibalize it. His image of a perfect sanctuary would be ruined in these images, which often affected his mood and sent him into angry rants against poachers and wildlife authorities.
Herzog films some footage of his own in interviews but the majority of the footage is sourced from Treadwell’s own camera. He filmed himself up close and personal with the bears, sometimes touching them, sometimes telling them to back off, sometimes sitting next to them as they looked for fish to eat. He professed to have a personal bond with the bears. He would give them names and invade their territory, but it was obvious the feeling was never mutual. If he could choose, Timothy Treadwell would be a grizzly bear.
What Herzog was able to accomplish with hundreds of hours of footage from Treadwell’s 13 summers in Alaska is an amazing feat of editing. He chose precise moments from Treadwell’s footage to illustrate just how unhinged, loving, sentimental, and broken he was. He holds respect for Treadwell as a filmmaker, diligently performing take after take until he got it right, being able to capture moments in the wild that would never happen on a union set, and the accidental beauty he captured when he would disappear from a shot and the stunning weight of nature captivated. Apart from this, he presents Treadwell as a rogue environmentalist, appointing to himself the mission of protecting the bears from poachers and attacking the government for their lack of protection.
How exactly did Treadwell protect the bears? I don’t know. I don’t think he did. In one interview with the Alutiiq Museum Director, Sven Haakanson, Jr., who is of the Alutiiq people, he said that Treadwell did more harm than good by allowing the bears to become comfortable with human presence. There’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed between bears and people and Treadwell crossed that line. That Treadwell had no real respect for bears in the sense that he could be destroyed in an instant, as they’re not cute friends but they have, as Herzog puts it, “an extreme indifference, half-bored interest in food.” Sven acknowledges Treadwell’s death as a tragedy but also points out that bears are different beasts from humans and the Alutiiq keep their distance from bears, living next to but not with them.
We hear from those that love Treadwell the most: his parents, former girlfriend, and a close friend he visited in the summer. They speak to his kind nature and sure sense of life mission, whereas others who know only his story speak of him as if he were careless, mentally disabled, or just stupid. An expert on the bear population in Alaska said they were a fairly healthy population and despite Treadwell’s claims, the poaching was at a minimum. There was no real threat to the bear population, but Treadwell insisted they needed his protection. I don’t know how he thought he was protecting them.
Later on, Treadwell films some fishermen or hunters, his enemies, anyway. They throw rocks at a bear, and it infuriates Treadwell. But he never comes out of hiding. He doesn’t confront the hunters or fishermen for their rude treatment of the bear, but he does eventually make himself known to them. This was a key moment that Herzog showed Treadwell’s powerlessness even amongst his own species.
Treadwell did everything you’re not supposed to do. He went within 100 yards of the bears, he camped in one spot for more than one week, he felt he was invincible because of a made-up bond he felt with the bears. He clearly loves nature and loves bears, but they couldn’t care less about him. Several times a bear will come too close to Treadwell, and he’ll tell them off, shout at them, stomp his feet, clap at them, and they eventually back off. He’ll then turn around and say that he loves them and he’s sorry. He would often claim to not be their master but their friend. Then he would tell the bear that they were the boss and then try to control them.
One time, he even tries to go swimming with a bear. The bear is coming out of the water and he’s going in, missing his chance to be in the water with it. When the bear’s back is turned, he goes in to pet its fur. Instinctually, the bear whips around for a moment in defense of what startled it, but Treadwell backs off and the bear moves on. It’s in these moments that Herzog paints the picture of Treadwell as someone who doesn’t have a true respect for nature or wild animals. It also points to Treadwell’s tendencies of self-destruction. Maybe he thinks he’s invincible. Maybe he thinks he’s genuinely friends with the bear. In many scenes, Treadwell acknowledges that he can die at the hands of these creatures. In some scenes, like this one, he seems to be trying to.
Herzog makes a decision to never let the audience listen to the tape that captured the audio of Timothy Treadwell’s and his girlfriend’s (Ami Huguenard) last moments. We hear from the coroner that examined the remaining body parts of both Treadwell and Huguenard, what the tape contained. He explains that Treadwell was being killed and yelling for Amie to run. She stayed and tried to fight off the bear but would ultimately become its second victim. The bear had eaten their clothing and most of their bodies, leaving behind a wristwatch that was given to close friend and former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak. Herzog advised Palovak, who had possession of the audio tape, to destroy it after he listened to it. Despite many of our morbid curiosities, Herzog’s decision is powerful in film. It’s the decent decision not put a person’s death up for entertainment, but it also lets the audience imagine for themselves, Treadwell’s last moments.
It was obvious that Treadwell was not a well man. He suffered in his earlier years from excessive drinking, depression, and possible bipolar disorder. A close friend mentioned he had a near-fatal overdose from an undisclosed drug. He found the bears after taking a shot at Hollywood and failing sent him into a downward spiral. He didn’t have many social connections in his life and clearly liked spending time among wild grizzly bears more than humans. He had a genuine passion for educating the public about grizzly bears, going around to schools and giving presentations free of charge. He died in 2003. What’s left of him now is his dangerous passion for the bears and the story of a man who seemed to gravitate towards a violent end, after being rejected by society.
Comments