
Right now, you know what you need to know to decide if you want to see the film. And if you do, I would beg of you to do so without reading this review. Or any other.
The reason I say this is because the fascinating, irresistible appeal of the film is how utterly it refuses to moralize the fate of Timothy Treadwell, self-proclaimed protector of all the bears in Katmai National Park. Many people who knew him are brought out to speak about his obsession; some consider him the most noble eco-warrior who ever lived, some consider him a naive but sincere nature lover, some consider him a danger to the bears he vowed to save. Herzog, who narrates, clearly views Treadwell as a helplessly deluded Romantic, seeing nobility and humanity in animals with only a dull sense of hunger driving them. Yet it seems possible to ultimately view Treadwell as all of these things, or none of them. He is a blank slate.
What seems beyond dispute is that Treadwell was a frustrated man with a desire to be seen and loved. He constantly talks to the bears about his frustrated love life; we are told of his penchant for creating an elaborate, false personal history; we hear of his stalled acting career. And he was self-deluded: constantly aware of the immense danger the bears represent, he speaks of the speed with which they could turn on a man - but not him, not TIMOTHY TREADWELL, for he is the friend and companion to all bears. He rants about how easy it must be for gay men to find lovers, and one suspect he doth protest too much. A smiley face painted on a rock drives him to a paranoiac fear of non-existent poachers who want him dead. He insists on the loneliness of his life, even as it becomes clear that he goes to great lengths to construct that loneliness.
And, he clearly believed in the rightness of his mission. Whatever drove him to the bears, he loved them, dearly and truly. When he says he would die for them, there is no doubt that he means exactly what he says. To me, the great unanswered - unanswerable - question of the film is, Just what went through his mind when he realized he was going to die? Was it fear? Anger? Gratitude? It is uneasily possible that it was something close to the last of these.
This being a Herzog film, the theme that can be unequivocally drawn is this: there is a line between humans and nature. We invented it and called it civilization. We can't go back over that line. Only a genius or a fool would try. Timothy Treadwell was one of these, but it doesn't matter which - the bears don't care, and a wise man tastes just the same as a fool, when the river's down and the fish are gone.
9/10
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