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Critics reviews

GRIZZLY MAN

Werner Herzog United States, 2005
One of the elements that makes Grizzly Man such a fascinating documentary is the contentious dialogue between Herzog’s narration and Treadwell’s running commentary, but it isn’t the film’s purpose to settle the debate over the correct perspective on nature. That was resolved by the bear. Herzog’s true interest is the more mysterious realm of human nature, and with Treadwell, he adds to a career-long obsession with visionaries undone by hubris and madness.
July 7, 2015
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One of the elements that makes Grizzly Man such a fascinating documentary is the contentious dialogue between Herzog's narration and Treadwell's running commentary, but it isn't the film's purpose to settle the debate over the correct perspective on nature. That was resolved by the bear. Herzog's true interest is the more mysterious realm of human nature, and with Treadwell, he adds to a career-long obsession with visionaries undone by hubris and madness.
July 7, 2015
There’s no way that Herzog isn’t aware that he’s also crafting a weird little comedy routine. The sound of his carefully enunciated psychological profile layered over the image of Treadwell silently going apeshit is just too blatantly jarring.
October 18, 2010
Herzog's bleak view of nature contrasts with his subject's rapturous sentimentality. Treadwell does get close to the bears, most of which seem to tolerate him, and foxes that have almost become pets. Herzog interviews those who knew him, an expressive and sensible bunch, and has made a documentary as strange and memorable as Touching the Void or Capturing the Friedmans.
April 28, 2006
The footage itself is mostly Treadwell's, but the film is a discordant duet of two voices: Herzog's old world pessimism versus Treadwell's new world optimism (which, as far as Herzog is concerned, masks a deep despair).
February 5, 2006
He [Treadwell] was certainly a brilliant performer and director who, by crossing the taboo line (by as it were impaling himself on the taboo line's barbed wire) vividly demonstrated the alien-ness of nature, and therefore its strange and terrible beauty, more than anything I've ever seen by David Attenborough. It is a superb documentary, because Treadwell has not been coerced or set up; he was enough of an amateur to be relaxed and unselfconscious, yet enough of a professional to generate all this outstanding footage, and quite rightly Herzog declines to patronise or make fun of him.
February 3, 2006
As a character critique it is hardly a mauling, for Herzog is too sophisticated a thinker, too respectful towards his subject, and altogether too humane to tear Treadwell apart for a second time. Rather, he presents him with palpable affection, but also a certain sternness, as though the bear expert were his own wayward son, and he the grieving father, driven to find some sort of meaning in a death so horrific and pointless.
February 3, 2006
At its most revealing moments, the film takes the form of an argument, between Treadwell's heedless conviction and Herzog's rationalist cynicism, over the nature of nature and the nature of man.
January 10, 2006
Ferdy on Films
I was haunted by thoughts of Treadwell after seeing Grizzly Man and longed to really know what made him tick. Sadly, this film was all about what made him stop ticking.
January 2, 2006
Narrating the documentary, Herzog allows the evidence to build while asking gently probing questions of his interviewees and the audience. His interest is not in excoriating Treadwell, but rather in goading us to ask ourselves the deeper questions about the nature of the universe. Is the universe ultimately governed by harmony, benevolence, and respect – or chaos, murder, and self-interest? Herzog’s treatment of the tragedy that befell Treadwell’s girlfriend and companion is particularly poignant, and like the rest of the film, rife with incompletely answered questions.
August 19, 2005
The New York Times
It is the rare documentary like "Grizzly Man," which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order.
August 12, 2005
Though Herzog pays tribute to Treadwell as a filmmaker, his film is anything but a hagiography. There is a powerful argument running through the movie, an ideological clash between Treadwell's environmental harmonizing and Herzog's view of the universe as an eternal catastrophe of destruction and chaos. It is a strange debate that rages beyond the grave, between the living artist and a dead man who sported a strange Prince Valiant haircut. But the synthesis between them is a source of enormous grace and power.
August 12, 2005