Grizzly Man might
be the best movie I’ve seen this year; it
certainly provoked the most reaction from me.
It’s a fascinating documentary, directed by Werner Herzog but
largely
shot by his subject, Timothy Treadwell.
Treadwell was a ne’er-do-well drifting through menial jobs and
substance
abuse who abruptly reinvented himself as a “kind warrior” fighting to
protect
Alaska’s grizzly bears. For 13 years, he
spent summers camping in the Alaskan wilderness, studying the bears up
close. I remember reading an article about
him some years ago in which bear experts predicted he would be killed
by a bear
– and about six months later, he was, along with his girlfriend
(somewhere, Stephen Colbert
is feeling vindicated).
Herzog took the hundred or so hours of
footage that
Treadwell had shot over the years and, concentrating more on cinematic
value
and character development than on wildlife, pieced together an
engrossing
portrait of an overweeningly narcissistic loon.
For someone who lived with wild animals, Treadwell is shockingly
naïve
about nature – he is distraught when he discovers dead animals, because
in the
idyllic world he has constructed in his head, animals are kind-hearted
and
innocent. He is one of those new-age
dips who twitters on about his connection with the animals and seems to
truly
believe that they understand him and are his friends. It’s
no coincidence that he names his advocacy organization “Grizzly
People” – to him, the bears
(to which he assigns dopey names like “Mr.
Chocolate”) are basically furry people.
Watching him infuriated me, but it also
enthralled me. Herzog does an outstanding
job not only of
assembling key bits of footage to build Treadwell as a character, but
also of
crystallizing Treadwell’s misbegotten notions of the harmony and peace
of
nature. With his melodious German
accent, Herzog neatly articulated what I was trying to sort out in my
mind,
what was so disturbing about Treadwell’s determined myopia.
Although an audio tape exists of Treadwell’s fatal mauling, Herzog doesn’t play it for us (though he films himself listening to it as Treadwell’s former girlfriend and close friend, who has never dared to listen to the tape, looks on, trying to read his expressions – the most moving moment in the film). But be warned: there are a few gruesome shots of the bear’s corpse (park rangers shot the bear after it threatened them), and a pilot and the coroner (who’s a little too polished and a little too eager to be on camera) give vivid descriptions of how Treadwell and his girlfriend were mauled.
And another warning: at one point,
Treadwell offers us a vivid close-up of fresh bear scat -- which, he
explains excitedly, "just came out of [the bear's] butt!" He
zooms in enthusiastically on the steaming pile of brown material --
which wouldn't have been quite so disturbing if Grant and I hadn't been
planning to make brownies right after the movie. So when Grant
said, "Want a steaming mound of brownies?" it was hard to say yes...
but I did anyway.
Unlike many of his fellow documentarians,
say, Errol Morris, Herzog makes himself
central to his own documentaries. He slyly plays on that with Incident
at Loch Ness, a mockumentary of his attempt (possibly a real
attempt,
I’m not sure) to make a movie about the Loch Ness monster.
His producer, Zak Penn, wants to make the
movie more commercial (including hiring a gorgeous model to pose as a
“sonar
expert” – and whip her clothes off to reveal a tiny bikini), sparking a
constant struggle between Herzog and Penn, between art and commerce. In this Möbius strip of a movie, there is
also a filmmaker, John Bailey, filming Herzog for a documentary to be
called Herzog in Wonderland. So,
to summarize: Penn directs the movie you
are watching, Incident at Loch Ness, which is mostly
Bailey’s footage for his movie, which is of Herzog making his
movie. Got it?
The film is quite funny, and nothing in
first-time director
Penn’s previous oeuvre as a screenwriter (he gave us such gems as Fantastic Four, Elektra, Inspector
Gadget,
and PCU) gave any indication that he
was capable of something as clever as this.
He and Herzog co-wrote the script, producing perhaps my favorite
line of
the year: when Herzog discovers that the
cryptozoologist he
asked Penn
to hire is in fact an actor pretending
to be a cryptozoologist,
he demands an explanation, and Penn splutters, “You asked me for
‘credible but
obsessive.’ Do you understand it’s
impossible to find both of those?”
Incident at Loch Ness
never winks, never lets on that it’s
anything less than real. This seriousness
hurts it a little bit when things turn weird – I got the sense that
some of the
“scary” sequences were meant to be genuinely frightening (they’re not)
– but generally
it’s clever and creative.
I could never get into Herzog's
fiction movies -- and I lost the desire to even try after a pretentious
bore at a party exalted "Werner" (as if they were drinking buddies)
endlessly and implied that I was some kind of feeble-brained philistine
for not liking his movies -- but I've really liked his documentaries
and the sly sense of humor he shows in them. Maybe it's time to
give the fictional films another try.
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