Grizzly Man
#32 in my movie challenge this year was Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, about Timothy Treadwell, self-styled protector of grizzly bears. He and his girlfriend eventually got eaten by one. Treadwell clearly had some mental problems, and he is by turns endearing and annoying. A compulsive self-filmer, his footage makes up most of the documentary. Herzog is a gentle, non-sensational documentarian. While he disagrees with Treadwell, he takes pains to show the many aspects of a complex person. Interestingly vague are Treadwell’s dead girlfriend, whose family refused to participate, and exactly how Treadwell protected the bears, which he insisted he did during his visits each summer for over a decade. Most scary was the fervent description of the deaths by the coroner, who seemed to enjoy his job way too much.