Grizzly Man

I can't deny that the story of Timothy Treadwell is compelling. On the surface he was either comically reckless or mind bendingly brave, but either way an infectious idealist who traded on what appeared to be a preternatural connection to his subjects and died the way that he lived: way too close to bears.

But as this well crafted documentary meticulously reveals he was in fact an incredibly complex individual who left many of the people who knew him conflicted about who he had truly been.

And I can't deny that much of the footage he managed to capture was both beautiful and spectacular, a good deal of which may have been resigned to obscurity had it not been for this film, which would have been a shame.

But even so I can't get over just how ghoulish this all is. How in order to tell it's painstaking tale we're being made privy to the private moments of a profoundly disturbed individual. Alone in the wilderness he began treating the camera as a confessional and the film has few scruples in exposing them. Seemingly an essentially ridiculous figure, he is unwittingly made the key figure in his own mockery.

I suspect a more respectful telling would have been less engrossing, and indeed that the film maker is entirely comfortable with placing his audience ill at ease, but this did little to temper the sense that watching these moments was really rather wrong, like rubbernecking at a traffic accident.