Finally I’m getting around to writing something about Herzog’s latest film. I’ll say first of all that I was surprised at the number of good reviews for this film, and that it seemed to do well on the art-house circuit. Having seen the film, I’m even more surprised.
Herzog has been cranking out decent documentaries for years now on all manner of obscure topics, and no one has taken much notice. His last feature film had been the disturbing Cobra Verde in ’87, though he did make a feature film a few years ago; the sweet Nazi-circus drama Invincible with Tim Roth. I’ll stop adding “which you should see” b/c this is Herzog, and it should go without saying you should see it.
But since then, it’s been documentaries, and for whatever reason, Grizzly Man seemed in tune with the critics. There are a couple of odd things about this film though: It’s mostly an exercise in editing, since the bulk of the film is made up of Timothy Treadwell’s own digital camera footage. Two: The main character is not very sympathetic at all – not to me at least. He’s a recovering alcoholic with a serious infantilism syndrome who anthropomorphizes everything in sight. He’s completely self-obsessed while trying desperately to convince everyone he is actually selfless and altruistic.
Alaska attracts bizarre people. I’ve met fewer really strange people in twelve years of living in L.A. than I did in four months in Alaska. And Herzog finds a real gem of a wacko in the Alaskan coroner who parcels out Treadwell’s belongings and gives a graphic dramatization of what Treadwell and his girlfriend’s last moments must have been like. We expect Treadwell to be overly dramatic when he films himself – he is after all a failed actor who decided to create his own life-movie in bear-filled wilderness. But this coroner is downright creepy, and it seems he’s been waiting his whole life for a German director to show up on his doorstep to film him while he recounts details of the gruesome death of two people.
Herzog’s view of nature is just as dark and – in his words “murderous” – as he claimed it to be years earlier in Burden of Dreams. It’s the polar opposite of Treadwell’s fairy-land of nature. There is a captivating and disturbing long piece of footage of two bears fighting over the right to mate with a female bear. There is no voiceover and no warning to how long and gruesome the fight will be. Watchinig Treadwell then describe the fight and its aftermath, I wondered how this guy had managed not be killed years earlier, he was so purposefully blind to the true nature of these animals.
The truth that Herzog reveals – largely through Treadwell’s own footage – is that he was not protecting the bears. Just the opposite; he is dangerously acclimating a group of them to be comfortable around humans, which is dangerous to both the bears and other humans.
This is a sad movie about how some people feel forced to reinvent themselves, how everyone has to feel they are special and that each person has a powerful singular gift, and how good intentions can be terribly wrong-headed. Our culture seems to foster this need to be “unique.” And of course it’s about Herzog’s usual overarching themes: Obsession, conviction, and powering on with some strange vision until it kills you.
I keep remembering the footage of Kinski in the jungle (in both Burden of Dreams and Herzog’s own My Best Fiend) with all of these butterflies landing on him, and one in particular dancing around his face and hands, as if Kinski had total knowledge of its movements. Then Herzog’s voiceover of his hatred of the jungle, of how the animals scream in violence and pain. Herzog remarks that “the jungle is a mess. even the stars here are a mess.” Nature is chaos to Herzog. Unlimited, murderous disorder. It’s ironic that Treadwell would leave the mess of his life in civilization, and create an order – a place for himself to belong – in the chaotic mess that is nature. Perhaps that’s evidence of what a wreck his life was that the chaos of nature would seem ordered to him.
And Treadwell’s own physical appearance – the hair, the frenzied physical movements – it’s eerily close to Kinski’s at times; though Herzog never admits such on film. It’s only when you hear Treadwell’s voice and words that you realize the two men are flip sides of a very odd coin…
i thought i’d posted a comment yesterday–but perhaps i got distracted and closed the window after typing it. mark, that’s a great review. it made me want to promote “grizzly man” in my netflix queue, except it hasn’t been released on dvd yet. good, that’ll give me a chance to watch “aguirre, wrath of god” and “fitzcarraldo” again before i see this.
in related news, courtesy hbo ondemand i watched anthony hopkins vs. a bear in “the edge” last night. pete and i went to watch this in santa monica years ago. enjoyable schlock. didn’t mamet write the screenplay?
Fitzcarraldo is in my top ten favorite films. Made remarkably better by watching Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and (somewhat) Herzog’s own My Best Fiend.
That is a great review–and gets at much of what I loved about the film (having watched it last night).
It isn’t just the coroner who’s creepy or outsized; the film seems full to the brim with people barely hanging on to their dreams of the world, trying to imagine it (or, often, Timmy) is or was something the evidence tends to say it’s not. And it took me a bit to get past Timmy’s self-construction, which I didn’t just find aggravating, but downright exasperating. I wanted the bears to eat him just to get him to stop talking… but then I got kind of sucked in, to the picture (sure) but also to him.
Because, and this is the only thing I want to add to Mark’s great review: Herzog doesn’t just seem to disagree with Treadwell’s portrait of nature. He seems to find it beautiful, even if horribly misguided. That paradox was the engine driving my appreciation of the film; all this gorgeous romanticizing (and some astonishing footage that Treadwell captured), coupled with another filmmaker’s vision (in Herzog’s editing, voiceover, interviews) that ran at cross-currents. A complicated and beautiful movie.
I don’t disagree with any of the comments but I found this film to be quite tedious toward the end. Herzog’s commentary was what kept me involved . . . how much he appreicated this nutjob was sweet and certainly Treadwell’s footage is fascinating to watch. I found March of the Penguins to be far more complicated and beautiful.
I think Mike is right to finesse Mark’s terrific review just a bit. There is a lot of evidence, especially in Herzog’s commentary, to suggest that he finds Treadwell horribly, tragically, misguided. Yes, Herzog’s own vision of nature is different than Treadwell’s. But that doesn’t stop him from tempting us to identify with Treadwell, sympathize with him. Herzog somehow manages to find a kind of kinship with Treadwell, and he even marvels at Treadwell’s gift as a filmmaker: “I, too, would like to step in here in his defense,” says Herzog. “Not as an ecologist but as a filmmaker. [Timothy] captured such glorious improvised moments the likes of which the studio directors with their union crews would never dream of.” Sounds a bit like Treadwell. The spontaneous, improvised, and unexpected is found in nature–and these are things the civilized world can never grasp. Mike’s right. This is a very complicated film. Herzog isn’t simply “the polar opposite” of Treadwell. The Air Haul guy who says Treadwell “got what he deserved” is. Herzog is somehwere in between, pulled in both directions at once.
I just can’t see how this is less complicated, less beautiful than March of the Penguins. The two can’t really be compared, though. This is a film about a man whose devotion to the brown grizzly is irrational, but it is also a film about filmmaking. This is an obvious but important point: Treadwell’s connection to the world of the brown grizzly is through the medium of film. He’s an actor and a director, obsessed with getting the right take, performing all the time and always remaining in full control. Just when you think his latest rant has taken him over the edge, he stops and, in search of another take, says “all right that’s my uh, happy stuff.” And off he goes again. Is he in search of just the right take? Or is he using the medium as a way of exploring his own (deeply hidden and deeply mixed) feelings about nature, about why he is where he is, doing what he is doing? At one point, he finds himself in a bee who died trying to extract pollen from an Alaskan fireweed, who died “doing its duty”: “It’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s tragic…” Then, “Well the bee moved! Is it sleepin’?” This is a seemingly innocuous bit of footage, but it shows, somewhat comically, that Treadwell is at least somewhat aware of the phenomenological frame his digital camera creates.
I think this film is one of the best of the year.
we saw this last night. i don’t know if i would say that it was one of the best films of 2005 but it was certainly very good. i didn’t find it tedious or boring in the slightest.
herzog’s own take on nature as murderous is not very much more interesting to me than treadwell’s view of it as his space to protect; like john, what i was most struck by is how this is a film about film-making, about performance etc. i loved the coroner–he was so ON, such a great ham. but the same goes for everyone who appears in the film, and i was really impressed by how herzog (mostly) unobtrusively highlights the filmic aspects of not just treadwell’s footage but the testimony of “real” people without falling into viewing this as an analogy of true/false. and i think his approach frees his subjects up in some ways: for example, at the beginning the pilot who finds treadwell and his girlfriend’s bodies describes the experience. in a conventional documentary he would likely zoom in on the trauma of the discovery (“how did it make you feel?”); with herzog he goes on almost rhapsodically about the frisson he felt about almost being killed himself and the adventure of trying to run the bear off with his plane. the camera/film, herzog says at one point (perhaps somewhere in the extras where he praises rashomon highly) creates truth of its own, and i think he demonstrates it wonderfully here.
as a side-note: for some reason i’d thought that there was video footage of the two being killed and that some of it was in the film. thus i was in a state of high tension in the first half of the film, expecting any scene with treadwell and a bear to suddenly be the one. i was quite surprised when at about the 1 hour mark it became clear that there was no such video footage and that herzog would not play the audio portion either (treadwell’s camera had been running, but with the lens-cap on).
Check out this online short. I think its hilarious (though I doubt all will); it certainly sums up my reaction to Grizzly Man, and it includes a higly memorable cameo by a Dan Brown novel.
“When you engrave the Oscar, its H. E. R. Z. O. G. It’s about time, seriously. I drove a boat over a mountain for Christ’s sake. Give me some props.”
Download film here.
that was quite funny. though the only bit that made me laugh out loud was the dan brown and twinkies bit, and the ending wasn’t bad either. most of the treadlowe/treadwell stuff plays like parody in the film itself.
Anyone as stupid as Treadwell should be dead. Unfortunately his stupidity was attractive his female companion
i saw this film last night and i thought it was the best fucking film of the whole fucking year. I FUCKING LOVED IT!!! did anyone put it on their year best lists?
hard to say–that thread is overrun by discussions of books of all things.
It was certainly one of my favorite films of the year, though I missed a lot of the “big” ones this year, and saw fewer films in a theater than I probably ever had.
Again, though, having said that, I am still a bit surprised by how much people like it
Someone shot at Herzog. You can read about it here. It’s marvelous the way Herzog responded–totally the I would expect him to respond.
I wonder how many directors have suffered attacks from so-called fans, or “enemies.”
he also helped phoenix in a car accident in laurel canyon. i never had anyone famous help me in a car accident in LA. i don’t think i even got anyone help me in a car accident in LA. i think i simply dusted myself off and made my own way to a public phone. now that i think of it, though, i’m not sure i ever even had a car accident in LA. once my car ran out of life near wilshire, so i just parked it on the side of the road and left it there to its destiny. we never bought a car that cost more that $1,000 the whole time we lived there, so the cars’ lifespan was never very long. still, i would have liked to be helped out of my car wreck by werner herzog.
Herzog once helped me buy a shirt. I thought the blue one looked nice, but he came over and suggested red. He was right. Thank you, Werner!
Eric Red ran me down last week in LA.
I got better.
did he also suggest that you not wear it inside-out, mike?
Just watched My Best Fiend, which is terrific. And as Mauer points out, it reveals as much about Herzog’s attitude towards nature as Grizzly Man does. The footage of the butterfly dancing around Kinski’s face and fingertips is marvelous. And yes, the footage of Herzog during the shooting of Fitzcarraldo reveals a great deal about how he regards nature.
Mauer said:
But Mauer leaves out this crucial bit of voiceover: “But I am drawn to it against my better judgment.”
My favorite scene in My Best Fiend is when Herzog goes back to the flat in which he lived as a 13 year-old. The area is now an upscale neighborhood, and the flat has been renovated and updated. “My mother worked hard, but the economic mircale left her behind” he says, as he takes us through the rooms, speaking wisfully about Kinski, who had lived with him in the building. His enthusiastic reminiscenses have no effect on the new owners, who look like Mr. and Mrs. Howell.