Grizzly Man (2005)

“Grizzly Man” is the 2005 documentary directed by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog (“Nosferatu the Vampyre,” 1979) about the late adventurer Timothy Treadwell, a Long Island, N.Y. native who made annual trips to Alaska to live among and document bears during the summer months. In 2003, during a rainy and windswept day near the end of one expedition, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were viciously mauled and gruesomely killed by a bear. It is captured on audio, but too horrifying even for Herzog to consider sharing with his audience here.

A cursory research reveals that an adult male grizzly bear can stand over nine feet tall on its hind legs, weigh almost one thousand pounds, and have claws up to four inches long. They usually will not attack a human unless they feel threatened, or are surprised at close range. Amazingly, little to none of this information is learned from “Grizzly Man,” despite the fact that Herzog went through 100 hours of film that Treadwell shot during his 13 summers spent observing bears at Katmai National Park on the Alaskan Peninsula.

Indeed, the movie has far less to do with bears than it has to do with Treadwell, who comes across as a deeply troubled man, whose disillusionment with the world and failures at life drove him into the wilderness to the only place left where he thought he could reign supreme. He tried college, but dropped out after losing an athletic scholarship; he almost made a splash as an actor, but quickly washed out after apparently losing out (to Woody Harrelson) a chance to be on the TV show Cheers. If people let him down, he seemed to believe the bears wouldn’t.

So he journeys into the wild to be with the bears under a half-baked, delusional guise of being their protector from things like poachers (even though Katmai is a federally protected national park where poaching is illegal). Many times during “Grizzly Man,” we encounter him walking up to bears, talking to the huge animals using a silly, high-pitched, infantile voice—the way that people sometimes talk to their dogs or cats or babies. At one point, he answers some of his critics with an angry, rambling, expletive-laced harangue into the camera, vowing to keep returning and fighting for bears. Treadwell’s level of condescension and narcissism is almost as astonishing as the details of his death are lurid and ironic.

Still, Herzog’s film is well made and consistently fascinating. As baffling, delusional and unlikable as Treadwell is as a subject, his story remains a strange and twisted cautionary tale of madness and obsession that spilled over into macabre tragedy.