REVIEWED - GRIZZLY MAN: MY BEST Fiend, one of Werner Herzog's most enjoyable documentaries, focused on the relationship between the great German director and the preternaturally eccentric actor Klaus Kinski. Though Kinski came across as significantly barmier than Herzog, the film remained a gripping meditation on what can happen when kindred spirits collide.
By contrast, the superb Grizzly Man, a study of the eventful life and avoidable death of one Timothy Treadwell, presents us with Herzog's philosophical complement.
Treadwell, a former actor from Long Island (he reputedly just missed out on securing Woody Harrelson's part in Cheers), lived significant parts of the last decade of his life among the unforgiving fauna of Alaska. Unarmed and with limited rations, Treadwell - blonde, ever-so-slightly camp - erected his tent in an area popular with grizzly bears. Undaunted by the prospect of imminent mastication, Treadwell set about naming the animals in his personal Eden and recording their movements on videotape.
Though Treadwell, possibly affected by some sort of bi-polar disorder, has his occasional moments of smoking rage, the film more often shows him resembling Basil Fotherington-Thomas from Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's Molesworth books. The curly-haired weed of St Custard's School was renowned for strolling through glades, oblivious to gathering bullies, blithely trilling, "Hello birds. Hello sky."
Treadwell, physically more prepossessing, though no less naive, was prone to telling bears and foxes quite how much he loved them. Had his life ended less gruesomely (or just later) one might have been more persuaded by this tendency, unusual in somebody who lived so closely with wild animals, towards sentimental anthropomorphism. Regrettably, Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed by bears in 2003.
Herzog, the creator of such fatalistic classics as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, clearly thinks differently about the universe to his late subject, but the director makes sure to express his admiration for Treadwell's skills as a wildlife documentarist. But, fascinating as the footage of ambling beats is, the core of this bleakly funny documentary remains Herzog's attempt to understand what drove the late eccentric. The contrast between the director's pessimism and his subject's slightly creepy buoyancy makes for consistently fascinating viewing.
"I believe the common denominator in the universe is not harmony," Werner interjects at one stage. "It is chaos, hostility and murder." Hello clouds. Hello sky.
