Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog, USA / Canada, 2005
4 out of 4 stars

A masterpiece. I was especially impressed by the inane attempts to understand the nature Treadwell's transgression. We have the pilot who recognizes that Treadwell couldn't take animals on their own terms but then starts assigning said animals the ability to determine a human "mentally retarded." We have the supporter who haltingly reads a few letters in order to characterize all opponents as anti-environment (effectively debunked later, as if there was any question).

And finally there is director Werner Herzog, who assigns a murderous, chaotic malevolence to a nature that is basically just the mirror image of Treadwell's own Disney-nature. Herzog really rips apart this view when showing Treadwell's distress at the natural consequences of drought and scarcity, but ultimately superimposes his own totalizing view on "the world" with a few lines of narration.

Finally, I was particularly fascinated by Treadwell's wistful speculation on how much easier it'd be for him if he was gay; the last time I laughed that hard was David Brent saying that "mixed race" people were his "favorite" on The Office Series 2. In my mind, this is the level on which the so-called "meta-bigot" works, in which we see the full perversity of such views from a remove without the slipperiness of direct narrative participation. It seems appropriate that Herzog doesn't provide narrative reactions to the individual personal revelations Treadwell provides in that segment of the film.

Source: Lionsgate DVD
13 January, 9:30 PM