Anodyne
Monday, December 19, 2005
 

To Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, which I somehow missed this summer.

The best film I saw this year, and one that, twenty-four hours later, I'm still struggling to assimilate. Largely composed of footage shot by pathologically idealistic Timothy Treadwell (foreground), prior to being attacked and eaten by a fuzzy pal (rear). Edited by Herzog, who adds voice-over narration and riveting interviews with Treadwell's friends and family, the bush pilot who dropped him off in the Alaska wilderness every year for thirteen summers, the coroner who performed the autopsy on the four "plastic bags of people" retrieved from the dead grizzly's gut, & etc. This sounds like black hubris-meets-nemesis comedy, and some of it is (the grotesquely overacting coroner; Treadwell bounding on stage to shake David Letterman's hand; the revelation that Treadwell was the #2 choice, after Woody Harrelson, for the bartender role on Cheers), but ultimately Herzog's film is a moving study of a man who, for complex internal reasons, could not fit into his own culture, a problem for which there was and unfortunately is no solution. Herzog also admires Treadwell as a fellow filmmaker, and his thoughtful "mix and translation" of Treadwell's raw footage is remarkable for how it simultaneously opens up Treadwell's troubled personality and his profoundly moving attachment to "his" animals and the Alaskan landscape.
- posted by cjb @ 9:12 PM


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