- Several interviewees in Werner Herzog's excellent documentary Grizzly Man describe the subject Timothy Treadwell as having crossed a line. The line is never particularly well-defined; sometimes it seems to be the zoological line between Ursus arctos horribilis and Homo sapiens, at other times it's the line between studying bears and living with them. Regardless, it is to Herzog's credit that he created a thoughtful documentary about Timothy that never once crosses the line from retrospective to farce. Instead, Grizzly Man is a fairly respectful look at the interesting life of a man who, quite simply, thought he could live with bears.
- The facts of Treadwell's life are reasonably well-established. Timothy spent thirteen summers camping in a remote national park and wildlife refuge in Alaska. During these summers, he would routinely videotape and interact with the grizzly bears and then use his experiences to educate schoolchildren and to attempt to increase public awareness of and appreciation for the bears' lives. Although he typically spent these summers alone, by which I mean without human companionship, his girlfriend Amie came along for the last two trips. At the end of what became their last trip, Timothy and Amie were eaten by one of the bears.
- As usual, Herzog has picked all of the right people to interview and presents a complete spectrum of colorful evaluations of Treadwell. Some people think he was mentally ill, others that he was a typical liberal environmentalist, and still others that he was incredibly brave. One naturalist points out that Timothy probably did more harm than good by making bears overly comfortable with humans, and I think everyone would at least agree that people paid more attention to the bears as a result of Timothy's actions. His reasons for going out to live with the bears, by Timothy's own admission, seem to have stemmed from his ongoing struggle with alcoholism, a struggle he ends up winning through his excursions into the wild.
- On the less serious side, certain accounts of Timothy's life are so odd and unintentionally amusing that they could have been taken from a Christopher Guest film. When his friends, Mr. Queeney and Jewel (who even bears a slight resemblance to Catherine O'Hara), describe that he worked briefly at the Queen Mary before taking a job as a squire at Gulliver's, a theatrical restaurant inspired by Gulliver's Travels, I half expected Eugene Levy to stomp out in a bear costume. Timothy's parents go one step further by mentioning quite casually that his life took a turn for the worse when Timothy tried out for the role of bartender in Cheers, but lost to Woody Harrelson. Suddenly, living with bears doesn't seem all that strange.
- Although Herzog peppers the film with his usual trite philosophy that the Universe is a chaotic and brutal place, I think he also puts these concepts to good use to gently criticize Treadwell. At one point, he juxtaposes Timothy's "sentimentalized" love for bears with the reality that male bears sometimes kill their young to free up females for copulation. While Timothy's philosophy stems from a love for all things natural and, specifically, ursine, he never seems to reconcile his affection with certain distasteful aspects of their behavior. Near the end of the film, we also get the impression that Timothy's mental health has started to deteriorate. Timothy's own footage shows that he is excessively paranoid about poaching and alarmingly hostile toward the National Park Service, an institution that even Herzog admits has some pretty reasonable rules about contact with bears. In that respect, Timothy may have been fortunate that things ended the way they did. Regardless of how individuals may have evaluated his life, nearly everyone agrees that Timothy Treadwell would have wanted, and probably even deserved, to get eaten by a bear. It's an interesting person who can earn that sort of eulogy.
