| WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE : Werner Herzog's 'Grizzly Man' (6/10) |
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| Wednesday, 05 October 2005 | |
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THE DOCTOR : So the population just sits there? Half the world's too fat, half the world's too thin, and you lot just watch telly Strange but true: Werner Herzog lives in Los Angeles. Contrary to his image as a fearless, jungle-tackling globetrotter, he makes his domicile in quiet, upmarket Californian suburbia - just up the road, as it happens, from downtown Hollywood. Film-festival audiences learned as much from last year's Incident at Loch Ness - because while Zak Penn's 'mock-doc' is amusingly riddled with (deliberate) fabrications, the glimpses of Herzog's private life therein are reportedly entirely verite. So if Herzog does obtain his long-overdue first Oscar nomination - for Best Documentary Feature - next January, he won't have far to travel for the Academy Awards ceremony. If so, he'll presumably be hoping for better luck than the last German-New-Wave auteur who popped up in this particular category. It's nearly a decade since Wim Wenders arrived at the bash as a hot favourite to win for smash hit Buena Vista Social Club, only to famously storm out when pipped at the post by One Day In September. Though rapturously received Stateside since premiering at Sundance in January, Grizzly Man may or may not fare better on the big night: it's a troubling film in many ways, but there's no denying that Herzog has delivered a bold, original and thought-provoking piece of work - on reflection, possibly too bold, original and thought-provoking for Academy voters. On paper, Grizzly Man has the makings of greatness: the tale of one fascinating, challenging, inspired, transgressive visionary, brought to the screen by another - the latter having made a living for nearly four decades by seeking what he here calls "the precipice of great bodily harm". But neither Herzog nor his subject - uber-eco-warrior Timothy Treadwell, who lived among and alongside grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska every summer for 12 years before falling fatally foul of their aggressive side - turn out to be what one might expect from reading, say, a film-festival catalogue synopsis. What we essentially get here is two films in one: Treadwell (whose life-story may well return to the big screen in a feature version starring and produced by Leonardo Di Caprio) routinely filmed his exploits on video-camera, showing the results to fascinated audiences of schoolchildren upon his return to 'civilisation', and planning to one day edit them together into a movie of his own. Of course, Treadwell - who was killed at the age of 46, along with his 37-year-old girlfriend Amie Huguenard - didn't get the chance to complete his long-gestating 'project'. Instead Herzog has assembled an extensive survey of the extant footage, incorporating not only Treadwell's 'for public consumption' monologues (in which he speaks excitedly, at times crazily, about his love for the bears and his determination to ensure their continued survival) but also the footage shot before the "roll 'em" and after the "cut" of these speeches - whose visual style inadvertently but distractingly recalls Rich Hall's 'Wear the fox hat' Miller adverts. This means we see Treadwell (a slight figure who, with his blond surfer/pageboy 'Prince Valiant' moptop and gently campy voice, is much more of a Goldilocks than a Grizzly Adams or even a Steve 'Croc-wrestler' Owen) in a very wide range of mental states: at several points he psyches himself up so much that he loses control and rants against his many enemies, coming across like a borderline-certifiable crank. The scene in which he becomes wildly enthused by ursine excrement ("poop") on the edge of a forest is only one among several jaw-droppers (incidentally settling, once or for all, the vexed issue of whether or not bears do in fact 'poop' in the woods.) Herzog's dry, world-weary voiceover offers a sardonic, at times searingly unsympathetic commentary on Treadwell and his aims - a commentary that occasionally becomes over-emphatic in its Nietzschean philosophising, just as Richard Thompson's guitar-heavy score occasionally veers towards the intrusive. And while there's no doubting the sincerity of the hyperenergetic Treadwell's love for the endangered Alaskan fauna (there are a couple of particularly ah-lovely sequences involving a half-tame fox named Ghost), his statements to this effect also become somewhat overpowering and repetitive. More worryingly, his up-close-and-personal methods and practices, while yielding some astonishing images of the bears at 'work' and 'play', were - as various experts unanimously attest - at best counter-productive, at worst harmful to both himself and the creatures he was so vociferous about protecting. Treadwell, during his appearances on mass-media outlets such as David Letterman's chat-show (his notorious reference to the bears as "party animals" is mercifullye excised here), seldom did himself many favours. And while George Bush's nefarious Alaska plans mean that this part of the world needs all the friends it can get, Treadwell's legacy remains a decidedly ambiguous one. "People should remain 100 yards from bears at all times," we're sensibly informed, and as one William R Cramer notes, "If you want to preserve bears and yourself, never act like Timothy Treadwell when you are around them." The more we learn about Treadwell's background - a fantasist and failed would-be actor, he was supposedly second choice for Woody Harrelson's role in Cheers - the dodgier Treadwell (who changed his name when he arrived in Hollywood) seems. Then again, Herzog doesn't exactly come across as very much more admirable - thanks to larks like Incident at Loch Ness, one does sometimes suspect (as with Lars Von Trier) that nearly everything he does is some kind of a put-on. Among his interview subjects here, for example, is a oddball coroner who seems to be auditioning for the next David Lynch picture. And while Treadwell would undoubtedly welcome the wider publicity for his cause Grizzly Man is now obtaining, it's hard to imagine he'd be best pleased about the way Herzog uses his footage and makes him look. With Treadwell no longer around, we have to encounter the man and his work through Herzog's somewhat jaundiced and distorting prism, whereas a more audacious and honest use of the astonishing footage might have been to let it stand on its own and speak for itself: red raw in tooth and claw, if you like. Neil Young 5th/6th October, 2005 GRIZZLY MAN : [6/10] : USA 2005* : Werner HERZOG : 103 mins seen on DVD (via PC) in Sunderland (UK), 5th September 2005 - originally rated 7/10, but downgraded on reflection, 10th Oct 2005 * made for television (The Discovery Channel) but first shown in cinemas |
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