Yesterday afternoon I went to the 2:20 showing of Herzog's new documentary Grizzly Man at Kendall Square's Landmark Cinema. It tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers living among grizzly bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were attacked and eaten by a bear in October of 2003.
The film is built from Herzog's piecing together parts of the over 100 hours of footage Treadwell shot during his 13 summers in Alaska and film taken by Herzog of the places Treadwell frequented, and interviews with Treadwell's friends.
Herzog does a heavy-handed voice over for parts of the movie. The worst moment of that probably being when he shows the glacier near where Treadwell worked, explaining that he sees the glacier as a metaphor for Timothy's troubled soul.
On the one hand, it is nice that Herzog is so up front and simple about the intellectual constructs which he is laying over the structure of the film. On the other hand, Herzog has a strange natural pudeur which means that some of the most interesting ideas in the film are the ones which are hinted at or not formally articulated.
Herzog is mostly interested in Treadwell as an artist and a filmmaker. Herzog feels that there is a connection between Treadwell's work in the wild of Alaska and his own work in the jungle.
Herzog might also have been attracted to the little bit of Klaus Kinsky you can see in Treadwell. When Herzog talks disparagingly of Treadwell's flawed image of the perfection and harmony of nature, both the tone and the substance are similar to what he has said about Kinsky's ideal of nature, especially in My Best Fiend.
There is another scene in Grizzly Man where Herzog makes an indirect reference to Kinsky. In the scene, Treadwell is shooting his closing remarks for the summer, in 2000 or 2001. He starts to talk about the park service and loses control of his temper. He falls into a violent, cursing rant. We see Timothy walk toward the camera as if to shut it off, then turn around and return to his mark to continue an escalating outburst of fury, indignation, passion, and hubris. During the voice over, Herzog says that he has seen this sort of thing before on a movie set, and it is impossible not to think of Kinsky. (It helps that Treadwell is also blonde, of course.)
Treadwell's hubris is the one thing about which Herzog never makes any direct comment at all, though it shines.
Another aspect of Timothy's life which comes through clearly is that he lived in constant fiction. Magical, barely sustainable fiction. At some point in his 20s, he changed his name to Treadwell and began telling people that he was an orphan from Australia. (He's from Long Island.) The biography on the website of the foundation he created still mentions his slight Australian accent. In interviews, his closest friends all talk like poor actors reciting a script. It's possible that I just have a cultural biais against Californians, but every one of his friends struck me as phony and hollow on screen.
Even Treadwell is not a particularly likeable character. He's childish and he never seems very intelligent. Here is this man doing something fascinating, larger than life, outrageous, but who seems almost unbelieveably shallow and almost uninteresting, except in his craziness. He tends to talk in a singsong. We never see him say anything about bears more complicated than what a third grader might understand. This might be mainly because he was making films to show to grade school children, but even in his monologues to himself, about his personal life, he never comes across as very sharp.
The sensationalist detail of the story is that the bear attack was recorded on the audio of Treadwell's video camera. He didn't have time to take off the lens cap. Herzog has enough sense not to use the tape, but we do see him listening to it. The tape is the property of one of Treadwell's closest friends, a woman who lived with him for three years and worked with him to create the Grizzly People foundation. Herzog shot the scene with his back to the camera. The woman faces the camera and we see her face as she watches Herzog's, as he listens to the tape.
The film is as much about Werner Herzog as it is about Timothy Treadwell, of course. And the girlfriend who was also killed is a nonentity.
There's plenty more to say about the movie, but I've spent enough time on this now. Good movie.
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Grizzly Man was the third of three movies that I saw this summer that involved (to one degree or another) the relationship between people and animals; the first two were The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (based on the book by Mark Bittner) and March of the Penguins. I wrote up some commentary on my web site about all three. (This was before the conservatives came up with the goofy idea that penguins are a good role model for conservative "family values", or I'd have had more to say about that.)