Member review

The seemingly self proclaimed messianic Timothy Treadwell spent 13 summers living among wild grizzly bears in Alaska. This is the documentary of his those years. From the moment this documentary starts, you cannot quite believe that Treadwell is for real. He may be acting for the camera but you would still have to be a pretty messed up to act like this much of a moron as a representation of yourself. Treadwell was making a film himself, a film glorifying his actions and sending himself up. And thus Herzog embarked on his journey to make a documentary on Treadwell, a film that ends up being as much a send up of Treadwell's film itself as well as a film on his life. This is where the fundamental problem lies for me personally. As well as using much of the poetic mode of documentary making to evoke specific emotions and the expository moder to give it narrative, the film is mostly of the performative mode, which does not sit well from the very beginning. We have all seen performative work very well with examples such as Supersize Me, which is a masterpiece in documentary filming, using biting satire to criticise an entire nation, but here it just does not work. Unfortunately, Herzog comes across arrogant, and unnaturally self assured almost as much as Treadwell himself. I may be a total imbecile and simply have lost the complete point of this film but reviews are subjective, and so I must speak my mind. Every piece of archive footage taken by Treadwell is unfortunately also accompanied by a self righteous monologue of Herzog's feelings on what it means and what we should think. Do we really care though? I think I would prefer to watch a documentary which at least seemed as though it was allowing me to decide for myself on how I feel (Capturing the Friedmans is a perfect example of this) rather than having them rammed forcefully down my throat by an admittedly otherwise good director. More examples of simply poor direction is the (so, so, so) obviously staged scenes with some of Treadwell's closest friends. It is personally rather insulting to our intelligence that these scenes were included when there was no point in them being there if they were staged like this. Yes, you could argue that the authenticity of the materials is not important, but rather the authenticity of the results, but this is just a step too far. Some of the strongest examples of this include the audio of his death scene -which is nothing but offensive considering it was set up beforehand and Herzog only teases us with it, listens to it himself, and then takes it upon himself to advise its destruction. Yes, that is if it even exists, which I would not even be surprised if it did not- and also the scattering of his ashes scene, which is frankly (regrettably) nothing more than laughable. I guess the main issue is, if you are going to have as unrelatable a protagonist as this in any film or documentary, at least give us a character study, rather than just constant opinions from the director. In fact, to give Herzog some credit, a documentary on Treadwell using mostly footage from the man himself is impossible considering the man never stopped acting (Unfortunately, he clearly thought he was something). This is why the film may have worked far better as a feature film where artistic license is far more valuable. And to get to the man himself, he just is not relatable. He spent 13 summers 'protecting' bears that weren't even in much danger and he never even became close to them. The closest he ever gets to them in this film is when he touches one as it is getting out of the water, but what follows is as soon as the bear is touched it threatens to bite Treadwell and he backs of terrified. This man was no grizzly man, just a man who thought he could become popular by doing something he thought no one else could do. To be fair, he may have survived 13 years, but this was probably mostly born from the sheer confusion he must have created in the bears themselves. You do not disrespect nature because you will regret it. Clearly he had never been taught this. Verdict: If you are going to undertake a film on a man such as this,could we have at least a little more subtle manipulation of the spectator please?