Grizzly Man....Child

I saw a human being disintegrate before my eyes this weekend. It was funny for a while, until I realized what was happening, then it got to be a bit sad. Then at the end, after the man had disintegrated it was funny again, but for a completely different reason.

Grizzly Man is a movie about Timothy Treadwell (and, yeah, the name sounds a bit like someone Mr. Rogers would go to visit and learn about manufacturing doll houses). Tim spends his summers in the Alaskan wilderness with bears. And I don't mean kind of looking at them from a safe distance. I mean going up to them and patting them on the nose and basically asking the bears daily if they should let him live. Tim may know Huey Lewis but he definitely never got the News about bears being, y'know...kinda dangerous.

Actually that's a bit dismissive. Tim knows they're deadly. He mentions the fact that he could be killed pretty much every other sentence. But he feels very strongly that he needs to protect the bears and learn from them. He did manage to collect a lot of valuable data about the bears migration, mating and other patterns too. That's the good part. The bad part? Tim is 100% batshit crazy.

The documentary is not about a Jane Goodall type doing research for science. No, he's more of a whacked out stoner guy who couldn't handle living with people so he tried something a little less tricky. Or more tricky, depending on where you fall on the whole evil people vs. hungry bear trickiness spectrum. The movie doesn't care about his research and his "protection" of the bears. It cares about Tim and his insanity and never stops revealing new layers of nuttiness.

We get to see Tim record a bear dropping a massive deuce and then, immediately, go up to the steaming pile of shit and put his hands on it. In a childlike voice he says "this poop was just inside her". He says it kinda dreamily. He also tells the foxes that hang around him "thank you for being my friend" in a voice that normally would be associated with an upset 13 year old girl. He doesn't understand the real world and adults. He doesn't like them. He throws temper tantrums and rants and raves at God to bring some rain so the bears can feed on the salmon in the rivers. At some point I tied together the childlike voice, the hatred of the outside world and his bizarre connection with the bears and I realized that bears are to Tim Treadwell what little boys are to Michael Jackson.
I shit you not. If you feel shitted then please reconsider for a moment, for you have not been shitted. I'm sure you feel shitted, but again, let me assure you, you have not been shitted. I shit you not.

The guy literally is falling apart in front of our eyes. It's sad but it's unavoidable. Part of me thinks it's great that he found something in his life that he loved. He managed to do it for 13 years too, which is impressive. Living with bears for 13 summers basically all alone would be very difficult. Not as difficult as pretending Nicole Kidman's hot or anything, but pretty tough. So he had that going for him. But he was crazy and he created enemies where there were none. In the long run he may have done more damage to the bears then any help he may have provided. I'll leave that for the biologists to sort out. I just know I saw a man fall to dust in front of me and it's kind of haunting.

Fortunately Werner Herzog has enough of an ego to put himself in the film. He has a thick german accent and narrates the film as well. It's inexplicable. I dare you to explic it. He also has a bizarre and overwhelming earnestness that is infectious. Many of Tim's friends and coworkers were like him (read: kinda fucked in the head) so it's fascinating to watch these people interact with Werner. It's like they trying to emote for him and REALLY get their point across when they're clearly uncomfortable doing so. It's fantastically funny in that awkward sort of way that I do so enjoy. Also, Werner films the pilot who worked with Tim singing along to a somber song. He sings a half beat behind the tune and he sort of mumbles it like you would expect an old cowboy to do. 100% awesome. I bring these little trivialities up because they distracted me from Tim's issues. And his issues are a bit too overwhelming for me. And unresolved.

Tim and his girlfriend were killed...how you ask? By a fucking bear you moron. It's sad but not tragic. You can't live with bears for 13 summers and not think this could be the way for you to die, so I have a hard time calling it a tragedy. As one less sympathetic person in the film notes "he got what he had coming to him". And it's true, not because he was a bad person, but if you live with bears then you can't be surprised when one is looking for a nibble.

Grade: AWE