casWerner Herzog’s films have often been about the extremes of humanity, and in Timothy Treadwell he has found a perfect subject. Treadwell spent 13 summers in the wilds of Alaska, surrounded by grizzly bears, fancying himself their protector. For the last five of these years he filmed himself, almost obsessively. And in the last summer he, along with his girlfriend, was devoured by one of the bears he loved so much.

What seems to fascinate Herzog the most isn’t the bears, although he’s happy to showcase some of the magnificent footage that Treadwell captured, giving the man serious props for showing us things we have never seen before. What Herzog is after is Treadwell himself, and examining and rebutting the man’s beliefs in a harmonious and beautiful natural world.

Treadwell makes an astonishing subject. A failed actor and an ex-drunk, Treadwell had an epiphany while visiting Alaska and decided to dedicate his life to protecting the grizzlies. What that means is never actually clear, and you begin to wonder whether Treadwell was just playing a game himself. After all, how can a man who hangs around these enormous, powerful beasts really protect them? And doesn’t he need protection from them?

Herzog rebuts many of Treadwell’s beliefs, and convincingly, but there are arguments here (and Herzog has called this film an argument between himself and Treadwell) that the bear lover definitely wins. It’s terrifying to see the bears come right up to Treadwell’s camera, snuffling and bristling at the invasion, but it’s equally amazing to see him deal with them. It’s incredible to see how he befriends some little foxes, almost domesticating them. Treadwell’s nature is a thing of peace, Herzog’s is a thing of chaos and violence. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.

While Treadwell can tame little foxes, he seems unable to tame himself. Boiling rages build up in him – in one scene he unleashes a tirade of profanity aimed at the Park Service, who he sees as sabotaging him. The cameras he had with him on his trips were meant to document grizzlies in the wild but they often end up documenting his own troubles – on a hike Treadwell delivers a soliloquy lamenting his inability to keep a girlfriend. He poses for the camera, creating a mythology of Timmy the Lone Warrior, the Peaceful Warrior, and it’s in these personas that we can see what the real damage inside Treadwell is.

Herzog travels to interview Treadwell’s parents and his ex-girlfriend. He goes to the spot where Treadwell and girlfriend Amy Huegenard were eaten alive by a grizzly bear – a moment caught on audio tape that Herzog won’t share with the audience. He does listen to it onscreen, and he does have a coroner describe it in detail made all the more horrifying by its clinical nature, but he never lets us hear it. You can’t help but wonder if he isn’t pulling the old horror movie trick of holding back the gore to let our minds fill it in with more realism.

While there’s plenty of Herzog footage, and while there’s a Herzog voice over (his lilting accent always makes me giggle, especially when he’s intoning about something particularly awful), the movie is Treadwell’s. His footage is always memorable, always beautiful, always strange. There’s a scene where he sees a bear shitting and runs up to the hot, steaming pile and touches it, almost orgasmic with his perceived communion  with the bear’s insides. This is the kind of moment you don’t write – it seems too weird, too fucked up, but Treadwell lived it.

Conservatives hate Treadwell, and believe he got what was coming to him. They see him as an eco-loonie, which I guess is fair. And on some level he did get what was coming to him. He talks about the dangers of being so near the bears again and again in his footage, but you wonder if he really believed what he was saying. His connection with the bears wasn’t just about ecology or respect, it was deeply and possibly pervertedly spiritual. It seems to me that Treadwell didn’t believe that he could be hurt by the bears because he was with them and of them. Interestingly, there’s evidence that the bear that killed him wasn’t one of the ones he had spent 13 summers with, but a stranger bear from further inland.

Hating Treadwell is beyond me – watching him in this film with his fey voice and his shaggy Prince Valiant hair and his every insecurity on display makes me feel bad for him. For me there’s no question – Treadwell was pretty much completely fucking nuts. But it’s the kind of nuts that has sent holy men into the wilderness for millennia, and you have to wonder what the big difference between Treadwell and St Francis really is. Besides the fact that St Francis didn’t spend a lot of time filming himself. What Treadwell finds in the wild with the grizzlies is an admirable thing, if impossibly dangerous. Herzog interviews people who feel that Treadwell had no respect for the bears, that he treated them like pets and pals, but to me it seems that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Treadwell had found his embodiment of God, and he approached these bears with endless reverence. It’s sort of fitting that he died the way he did.

(Although I should say that there is plenty of evidence for a completely different reading, of Treadwell as a psychopathic narcissist who didn’t love the bears but rather how they offered him a chance to be special and to be a star. He’s definitely someone whose interest in being famous and loved may well have given his conservational motivations a run for their money, given a chance.)

What I love about Grizzly Man, and I did love the film, is that Herzog has crafted a documentary that makes very clear his own feelings and opinions yet leaves room for you to form your own. He includes footage that may contradict his own voice over. He respects the viewer – and Treadwell – enough to encourage your own interpretation. Herzog has created a film that challenges and embraces Treadwell. Grizzly Man is by turns hilarious, scary, touching, beautiful, bizarre, fascinating and always thought and argument provoking.

8.8 out of 10