'Grizzly Man,' a victim of his passion

According to his family, Timmy Treadwell dreamed of becoming a movie star. Only in death did the self-styled eco-warrior and Dr. Doolittle to the Alaskan grizzly bear achieve the dream.

In 2003, when Treadwell and companion Amie Huguenard were mauled and devoured by a voracious bear (or two), they left behind more than 100 hours of video. Prominently featuring Treadwell as a jester who stumbles into the heart of darkness, this footage is the basis of Werner Herzog's magnificent tragedy, Grizzly Man, a Shakespearean character study that packs the sheer terror of The Blair Witch Project.

In his own footage, Treadwell comes off as a surfer dude who nuzzles the beasts in Alaska's Katmai National Park as if they were creatures in his own personal teddy bear menagerie. In Herzog's view, the guy with the Owen Wilson demeanor, Pee-wee Herman voice, and Grizzly Adams hubris was a delusional man who crossed the line between human and animal.

The exquisite tension between Treadwell's Animal Planet self-mythology and Herzog's unsentimental investigation into his life and death makes for a profound work of storytelling. (The tale is also the basis of Nick Jans' fine book The Grizzly Maze, but I prefer the Herzog version.)

No stranger to grandiose personalities and death-defying landscapes, Herzog is best known for the drama Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), about a crackpot conquistador in the Amazon jungle, and the documentary La Soufrière (1978), which he filmed on the evacuated isle of Guadeloupe just as an active volcano was about to erupt.

In Grizzly Man, Treadwell, the obsessive who pitches his tent smack in the middle of the bear buffet, is so obviously off his rocker that he scares the extreme Herzog into a balanced rationalism.

For Herzog, it is important to find what fueled this driven personality to overidentify with the grizzly. In interviews with Treadwell family members, friends, and Alaskan colleagues interwoven with his subject's spectacular nature footage, he finds that the man born Timothy Dexter on Long Island in 1957, who struggled with drugs and alcohol and credits his friends the bears for his sobriety, had a casual relationship with the truth.

The man now known as Timmy Treadwell periodically reinvented himself as a bartender, an Australian naturalist, an unemployed actor, a lifeguard to the bears. In the self-assigned role of bear protector, Treadwell got the role of a lifetime, creating a mythic character with the crazy charisma of Kipling's Man Who Would Be King, O'Neill's Emperor Jones, and Conrad's Kurtz.

Interspersed with sequences of Treadwell talking to the bears, singing to them, and swimming with them are Herzog's interviews with scientists who talk about how people who anthropomorphize animals lack respect for them. Treadwell imagines the bears as humans in furry suits; Herzog shows us a bear paw torn off by the cub's father because it wanted the cub's mother to stop nursing and be available for sex. Treadwell dances for the bears: There are sequences in Grizzly Man where Treadwell performs a Bear Dance not unlike the Paiute holy ritual where tribesmen dance their prayers for food.

In a movie where each sequence is more astonishing than the last, the one that smacked me in the solar plexus was a shot of Treadwell's personal effects, among them his childhood teddy bear.

For this lost boy, the grizzlies were consoling companions, manifestations of his own beastliness, and, finally, the ultimate transitional objects.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey

at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Grizzly Man

**** (out of four stars)

Produced by Kevin L. Beggs, Bill Campbell, Phil Fairclough, Andrea Meditch, Erik Nelson and Tom Ortenberg, written and directed by Werner Herzog, photography by Peter Zeitlinger, music by Richard Thompson, distributed by Lions Gate Films.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 mins.

Himself. . . Timothy Treadwell

Herself. . . Amie Huguenard

Himself. . . Frank Fallico

Parent's guide: R (extreme medical candor)

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/NJ