| Now Screaming: The Devil's Rejects Grizzly Man |
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Reviewed by Dennis Daniel
Cast: Timothy Treadwell: Himself Credits: Director: Erik Nelson and Jewel German Director Werner Herzog is a towering figure of world cinema. Unique. Profound. Mesmerizing. He is, in my estimation, one of the top ten greatest filmmakers of all time. To watch a Herzog film is to be catapulted into the very heart of darkness, with the light of hoped for redemption surrounding the utter blackness in a desperate attempt to penetrate, pierce through, and save us. It rarely does. He is a realist. A visionary. An iconoclast. A storyteller. In film after film, Herzog places before his camera lense the kinds of images that remain imbedded in the mind and heart. From the doomed, insane Spanish conquistador Aguirre, the wrath of god, floating down the Amazon on a raft full of dead men and miniature monkeys, pontificating about his reign as king of Eldorado, to the hopelessly destroyed, burned out and smoldering oil rigs of Iraq, smoldering and filling the sky with poison filled black smoke, rising high above the earth and spreading it’s message of waste and pointless death and destruction. These are not images created with special effects. Herzog is there. A witness. Documenting his vision for all to see. No matter the cost! It did not matter to Herzog that actor Klaus Kinaki was certifiably insane. He channeled that insanity through the lense, creating Kinski performances of pure genius that have never been equaled. Again and again, he assaults our senses with overpowering reality, sending the viewer into a tailspin of cascading thoughts that lead to the ultimate questions: Why are we here? What drives us? What moves us? What makes us…human? Herzog leaves no stone unturned in his determination to bring his vision to life. The perils he and his crew have endured, from the deepest, darkest areas of the Amazon jungle to the highest mountain peaks, are endured because to Herzog, no danger, no crisis, no obstacle will stop him. As he has said time and time again in interviews and the director’s commentary on the DVD releases of his films…”I don’t matter, the actors don’t matter, the hardships don’t matter…all that matters is what you see on the screen.” Whether it is one of his original screenplays, an adaptation, or a documentary (a description Herzog abhors…he simply considers himself a “storyteller”) the method behind the madness he presents is one of total realism. Even when you’re looking at astonishing images like a cascade of clouds rolling over mountains like a giant waterfall from heaven (achieved through stop motion photography) in HEART OF GLASS, it is all very real (because Herzog camped on top of that mountain for 3 days taking one shot every three seconds). The reality adding wonder, depth and weight to the visions because we know it is real. The dreamers, visionaries and madmen that populate Herzog films like AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, FITZCARRALDO, COBRE VERDE, WOYZECK, THE ENIGMA OF KASPER HAUSER, STROSZEK, HEART OF GLASS, and INVINCIBLE act as cinematic extensions of mankind at his most inquisitive, vulnerable and determined. Good or bad, these characters LIVE LIFE! They show what humans are capable of in both triumphant and terrifying ways. Sometimes, both ways at once. So it is no wonder that Herzog would find the a story of Timothy Treadwell, a man who lived among Grizzly bears in Alaska for 13 summers, and was eventually eaten by one, to be right up his alley. GRIZZLY MAN may very well be Herzog’s greatest achievement. He himself has said that one scene in particular, where he watches Treadwell’s former girlfriend and colleague watch HIM as he listens and reacts to a tape that was fatefully recorded as Treadwell and his girlfriend were being killed by the bear (a tape we never hear), to be one of the most devastatingly emotional of his entire career. Timothy Treadwell is another one of Herzog’s determined, madmen with a purpose. An unsuccessful actor, former drug addict and alcoholic, whose addictive personality went from interior chemical to exterior natural. He decided that he wanted to save the Grizzly bears. And so, every summer, he went to Alaska and lived among them. He documented their habits, their wonderings, and their lives. He anthropomorphized them, giving them names like “Mr. Chocolate” and “Sweetie.” He broke all the known rules about having contact with these ferocious wild animals…filming himself petting them, swimming near them, talking to them, yelling at them, and saying over and over, “I love you. I love you.” He traveled around the country and gave lectures and slideshow presentations to schoolchildren, for free, about his Grizzly pals. As the years passed he become addicted to the idea of his being their savior, their champion. In a national park where the bears are totally safe, he felt they needed protection. He says, over and over again on these tapes that he is more than willing to die for these animals. To him, they were his family. Point of fact, Treadwell literally wanted to become a bear. This was his mission. This was his passion. This was his illness. Treadwell left behind hundreds of hours of video tape, and it is from these archives, mixed with interviews from friends and family, along with a beautiful score by Richard Thompson, that Herzog tells this sad, yet somehow, uplifting tale. Most of all, it is Herzog’s narration that gives the film an anchor, an outsider looking in voice, and…in many ways, a kind of moral compass. To Herzog, Treadwell is both a dreamer and a tragic figure. Tragic because he truly missed one of the most important aspects of all this “work” he was doing. He missed the point that these were wild animals. Not his buddies, his pets, his brothers and sisters. In the end, he died quite a horrible death, taking both his girlfriend and two bears that had to be killed along with him. Herzog beautifully sums up the point about the true essence of wild nature in a scene from Treadwell’s footage. In it, we see a giant Grizzly staring at Treadwell’s camera. As the bear looks directly at us, we hear Herzog say: “Want haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare only speaks of a half bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend. A savior.” It would seem, with hindsight, that some dreams are better left unfulfilled. In the end, GRIZZLY MAN is not a film about wild nature…it is a film about human nature.
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