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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Werner Herzog's amazing documentary about a doomed grizzly bear researcher; a ruthless film about a hypersexual 15-year-old; a riveting civil rights story, and more.
Aug 11, 2005 | Our theme this week is minimalism, which is another way of saying that movies made on an intimate scale with few resources can make a big impact, if the filmmaker in question has something to convey.
OK, it's really another way of saying that Beyond the Multiplex is back from almost two weeks of vacation (I know it was tough, but you survived somehow) and here we are in late summer, when the film calendar reaches its most miscellaneous moment.
So it's a grab bag of goodies, essentially unrelated except for the fact that they're being released in out-of-the-way theaters in August (or later) and they need your help! Our marquee offering this week isn't going to challenge "Citizen Kane" for the title of best movie ever, but it might make a big splash among a certain demographic: "Pretty Persuasion," featuring an amazing performance by Evan Rachel Wood, is a would-be teen cult classic that should be appearing on dorm-room TV sets well into the next decade.
I'm sneaking in a last-minute review of Werner Herzog's stunning documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the man who lived and died among Alaskan grizzlies, one of the most hair-raising films you'll ever see. There's also the chilling but finally heroic story of one of America's last lynchings, a horrendous event that sparked the civil rights movement; a haunting Japanese miniature about the loneliest man in the world; and an ultra-low-budget New York indie that captures something of the city's mystical post-9/11 spirit.
"Grizzly Man": New Age dude stars in "Heart of Darkness"
"I've got the smell of death on my fingers," Timothy Treadwell says to his camera near the beginning of Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," with a brown bear that outweighs him by several hundred pounds snuffling in the near distance. You gasp, knowing what will happen to Treadwell not long after that video was shot. You'll gasp plenty more times in "Grizzly Man," but by the end of Herzog's remarkable meditation on violence, nature, filmmaking and -- his usual subject -- the mystery of human nature, you've seen Treadwell discuss his own death so much that the event itself seems less ironic than inevitable.
Herzog, who for my money is the best and strangest documentarian in the field today, was entrusted with more than 100 hours of video Treadwell shot during his last four summers among the bears of Katmai National Park, on the Alaskan peninsula. If Treadwell is looking down from bear heaven, I hope he has enough sense to be delighted. Herzog immediately recognized the doomed ursine-lover as exactly the sort of damaged, vainglorious dreamer he has pursued in all his fiction and documentary films -- in some ways, the sort of dreamer he is himself.
Although Treadwell reveals himself in the footage (and in Herzog's separate research) to be a severely troubled man -- both naive and arrogant, with delusions of grandeur and a paranoid streak that seems to get worse as time goes on -- the filmmaker clearly views him with affection. Herzog never succumbs to the mockery much of the media coverage fell into after Treadwell was killed in October 2003 ("Man loves bears; they eat him" was too delightful a narrative to resist). Part of this is technical: As Herzog shows us clearly, Treadwell developed into a fine amateur filmmaker, and captured a mother lode of unreproducible wildlife footage. When he wakes up to a fox cub playing atop his tent, and photographs it from the inside, Herzog observes in voice-over: "All the Hollywood directors, with all their union crews, could never think of capturing this moment."
Furthermore, as irrational as Treadwell's quest may have been, Herzog wants us to remember that he lived intimately among ferocious wild animals for 12 seasons (and almost all of a 13th) without major incident. The story unfolds with the fatefulness of Sophocles: We watch Treadwell, in his video diaries, becoming more and more confident of his abilities, and also more and more clearly unhinged. He fervently believes he is protecting "his" bears, gives them names, tells them he loves them. But protecting them from what? Katmai is a national park, where thousands of bears live unmolested. There is no legal hunting, no commercial development and (according to a biologist Herzog interviews) very little poaching.
The death of Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard (who is almost invisible in the film -- Treadwell rarely photographed her, and her family declined to participate), probably happened because they returned to their camp in the fall, well after the point when they customarily left for California. The bears Treadwell knew and who knew him had left or gone into hibernation; the one that killed and ate him and Huguenard was a strange elderly male, alone and desperate for food late in the season. As Treadwell tells us himself in one video excerpt, old, hungry and solitary bears are exactly the ones that decide to turn on humans.
You may learn more about the gruesome details of Treadwell and Huguenard's deaths than you want to know, but Herzog never shows us the autopsy photographs or plays the notorious audiotape of their killings. (One of them evidently turned the camera on when the attack began, but never took the lens cap off.) In perhaps the film's most dramatic scene, Treadwell's ex-girlfriend and executor, Jewel Palovak, allows Herzog to hear the tape through earphones. He listens for 30 seconds or so, then takes the phones off. "You must never listen to this, Jewel," he tells her. (Later he tells her to destroy the tape -- otherwise, the temptation to hear it will always be with her.)
Personally, I was deeply grateful for that restraint. The death of Huguenard, who may not have wanted to be there at all that October, was a tragedy, while the death of Treadwell was something he half-expected, an event he looked for with both dread and longing. But both of them still deserve some shreds of dignity. Herzog speculates that Timothy Treadwell -- like almost everything about him, the name was a fiction -- crossed an invisible boundary no human should cross, in search of primordial fusion with the animal world. He got it, and how. Herzog wants us to see a deluded nobility in this quest. Treadwell's flawed dreams were, in the end, all too human.
"Grizzly Man" opens Aug. 12 in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, with more cities to follow.
