Rating: B
Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Timothy Treadwell, Werner Herzog, Jewel Palovak, Sam Egli
Treadwell was the man who, for more than a decade, spent summers living up in Alaska among the grizzly bears. He had a passion for animals, positioning himself as their protector. Not all the bears felt similarly. In October 2003, Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by a bear. Audio footage of the attack was recorded. The quixotic endeavour of Treadwell and its ironic resolution resonated with Herzog – himself no stranger to the great outdoors and the insanity it can breed – who assembled a documentary on the life and death of the wilderness ddweller. What was Treadwell trying to accomplish? Was he the altruistic ecowarrior he portrayed? Or was there self aggrandisement involved?
As depicted here, it’s a bit of both. Treadwell appears to have been a complex character, prone to flights of fancy. He fabricated a background for himself in which he came from the Australian outback, and I don’t believe the story he lost out to Woody Harrelson for a role in Cheers. But there was clearly a genuine passion for wildlife, and bears in particular, misplaced and dumb a lot of his actions clearly were. Herzog speaks to an Alaskan native, Sven Haakanson Jr., who is aghast at what the outsider did: “You don’t invade their territory… Timothy Treadwell crossed a boundary that we have lived with for 7,000 years.” These particular bears didn’t really need protecting either, from what I’ve read.
Having said that, he didn’t deserve an unrepentantly grim fate, one of the responders explaining, “We hauled away four garbage bags of people out of that bear.” That’s before we get to the audio snuff tape. We don’t hear it. A coroner describes the recording, and we see the reaction of Herzog and a friend of Treadwell, Jewel Palovak, listening to it. That’s enough: the director advises her to destroy the tape, Herzog later calling it, “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” And that’s something, coming from a man who made multiple films with Klaus Kinski. [A relationship likely referenced when Herzog says of Treadwell in his later stages, “The actor in his film has taken over from the film-maker. I have seen this madness before on a film set…”]
I think this was tragedy born of hubris, an area which has frequently been at the core of Herzog’s work. Treadwell’s vision of bears ended up at odds with the reality. That it took so long before disaster struck is the most surprising thing – likely a result of these bears having easier sources of food than foolish humans. Large, omnivorous animals like bears, are your friends only until the salmon runs out, at which point harsh language is likely to provide insufficient protection. Otherwise, I perhaps don’t entirely disagree with the critical letter sent to Treadwell’s friend, Marc Gaede, which concludes, “We need to somehow drastically increase the number of bears in America. Especially in such key spots as the Berkeley campus.” But a scene where a fox steals Treadwell’s baseball cap and runs off with it, made me wonder if the foxes killed him, and framed the bears…