Film Review: Grizzly Man

I went for a two-hour hike in the woods this morning along one of Rossland's many hiking trails. I returned with four enormous blisters and a pain in my groin. I went without bear spray or whistle, which was silly, and my other reason (the blisters being the primary one) for not venturing further. On my way back into town, resolving to stay in upper Rossland for the next while because walking up the mountain to get home was draining, I stopped off at one of the local coffee shops and had a muffin and a mocha. When I got back home, I had Shan show me how to use the XBox, so that I could watch Grizzly Man.

Ok, I've seen a lot of nutbars in my life (many of them recently), but this guy pretty much takes the cake. I couldn't get over Tim Treadwell's brazen stupidity. I couldn't get over his egotism. I couldn't abide his vanity. I could barely take the entire film seriously, because not only did Tim Treadwell seem completely unreal, but so did most of the other characters involved in the making of this documentary: the coroner, Jewel the ex-girlfriend, Warren Queeney the actor friend, and most of all, Werner Herzog the filmmaker. I almost thought this was a mockumentary.

In case you didn't know, Treadwell spent 13 summers in the Alaskan wilderness living amongst grizzly bears. He eventually, along with his girlfriend Amie, gets eaten by one. While I won't go as far as saying he deserved it, I would have say I was unsurprised. They're grizzly bears! They're huge! They're wild! They get hungry in the fall! But Tim Treadwell seemed to think they were his friends. He named them, he followed them around, he revelled in their poop, he talked to them like they were pets. He frequently could be heard telling them in a high-pitched voice generally reserved for speaking with a beloved cat how much he loved them ("I love you, I love you, oh, I love you!").

Treadwell was on a mission. He wanted to save these bears, protect them, and in turn, he believed they were saving him from a life of addiction and mental illness (it was suggested that he was bipolar and I suspect he had other mental issues, not to mention some kind of personality disorder - the guy was paranoid, narcissitic, and quite certainly delusional). Yet I couldn't help but laugh out loud during a scene where some tourists were throwing rocks at a bear, and Treadwell - who saw himself as the bears' saviour - decided to remain hidden in his army camouflage and not come to the aid of the assaulted bear. He was too chicken shit to confront the rock-thrower. Some protector. (OK - they might have been poachers with guns, but still...)

While the premise behind his mission is applaudable, and his desire to tour schools to teach children about grizzly bears free of charge is admirable, this man's worst enemy was his vanity, not the government whom he deemed neglectful and hypocrytical, and certainly not the grizzly bears, who were only doing what came naturally to them. This was a guy - with no scientific background, by the way - who wanted to be famous, who wanted rock star status, and who got it all posthumously via his own recklessness.