Recently Animal Planet aired “Grizzly Man,” a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the conservationist whose bizarre fanaticism over grizzly bears cost him and his girlfriend his life: In 2003 in Alaska, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were eaten by a grizzly, and the six-minute incident was caught on audiotape. Grizzly Man is a well-done documentary that is a mixture of Timothy Treadwell’s grizzly bear footage and interviews with people who knew him.
The man was a nutcase, I’m sorry to say, and the documentary captures this by showing footage of him speaking into his video recorder. Timothy Treadwell was born Timothy Dexter and led a non-eventful life, growing up in the big city and getting a diving scholarship to a college. Once off to college he started hanging with the wrong crowd and drinking, suffered a back injury and lost his scholarship.
He set off to California and changed his name to Treadwell, and at some point, tried out for the part of Woody in “Cheers.” Supposedly, he was second choice to Woody Harrelson. This loss crushed him and he overdosed on drugs. After recovering, he decided it was his mission to save the grizzly bear.
The documentary fails to bridge this huge leap from drug overdose to moving to Alaska to live with grizzlies without any human contact. Every year for 13 years, Treadwell would spend several months in Alaska’s barrenness (the last two years with ??), getting within feet of grizzly bears; all caught on his videotapes. The interviews with people who knew him, including his parents, are very well done.
One of the interviews is with the man who was scheduled to pick Treadwell and ?? up after they had spent a few months living among the grizzly bears. He narrates how he landed his plane in the water but saw no sign of Treadwell or ?? He immediately sensed something ominous and actually spotted a bear chewing on human remains. He bolted into his plane and tried to scare off the bear by sweeping the plane overhead, and while doing that, saw what he described as a human head with some vertebrae attached.
The only other flaw in Grizzly Man, other than failure to bridge the gap between the overdose and his devotion to bears, was that the documentary offered no explanation as to how Treadwell made enough money to survive, and how he lived when he wasn’t living in the wild. By the way, Grizzly Man does not air that audiotape, but they show someone who knew Treadwell listening to it in the company of a former girlfriend.
You’ll like this film. Treadwell cannot be compared to Steve Irwin (see my content, titled: Steve Irwin and Timothy Treadwell: no Comparison). There is one scene in which Treadwell, speaking to the video camera, throws something of a tantrum, keeps raising his middle fingers, throws punches, curses loudly, and looks ready to tackle anything human that gets within 10 feet of him. He’s pissed off at people who don’t care about bears. Another clip has him feeling a pile of bear poop and talking lovingly about it.
There is also very disturbing footage of him, recorded I believe one day before the fatal attack, in which he boasts that he will never get attacked because he knows how to do it “right,” that is, live among grizzlies. Well, he did something wrong in his thirteenth year of living with these animals.
