The amazing thing about Timothy Treadwell was that he survived 13 summers in the Alaska wilderness, living among gigantic, ferocious grizzly bears, until one of them finally ate him. Treadwell was a combination environmental activist, societal rebel, filmmaker, nutcase and holy fool. In other words, he was not unlike Werner Herzog, director of "Grizzly Man," the brilliant new documentary about Treadwell's life and horrible death. Herzog is much more self-aware than Treadwell ever was, and has much more of a sense of reality and irony. But as a filmmaker drawn to impossible projects ("Fitzcarraldo," "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"), he feels a definite kinship to Treadwell, even as he's appalled by Treadwell's egregious lapses of judgment. Treadwell shot more than 100 hours of film of himself and his beloved grizzlies, and Herzog culls the best of that film for "Grizzly Man." In his own film footage, Treadwell showed himself consistently to be an arrested adolescent, conflating the terrifying behemoths he lived among with his collection of teddy bears. (He speaks constantly of the mortal danger of living among grizzlies, but never quite seems to believe his own words.) Yet he also captured some of the most amazing nature scenes ever recorded, and Herzog respects him for that. (In his narration, Herzog also expresses great tenderness toward Amie Huguenard, the woman who loved Treadwell, followed him to the wilderness despite her fear of bears, and shared his horrible fate.) Whereas Treadwell sought order in nature, and believed the grizzlies loved him as much as he loved them, Herzog sees nothing in Treadwell's story except the workings of a chaotic universe sending one more dreamer to his doom. But because Treadwell's dreams were so outsized, Herzog sees him as a brother. So, thanks to Herzog, do we.

This is one of the most riveting documentaries of recent times. And only Werner Herzog could have made its many cogs mesh so tellingly and troublingly. By chronicling Timothy Treadwell's life and providing sympathetic but often-corrective commentary, Herzog shows how one man's benighted quest led him to filter out unpleasant facts in favor of self-aggrandizing fancies about his role in the scheme of things. (Treadwell not only looks a bit like the late John Denver but also seems plagued by the same egotistical drive to play the high-profile hero.)

Through Treadwell's footage as well as Herzog's own well-chosen interview sequences, we see the man whole: his naïveté and childlike delight, his folly, his self-dramatization, and the inner madness for which the natural world was perhaps a convenient but ultimately fatal escape hatch.

As soon as Treadwell styles himself the "protector" of millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness where grizzly bears are the top predator, we know that this man is headed for a horrid end. In his hyperbolic, self-indulgent protestations of love and protection toward the land and its creatures, we hear the unmistakable accent of a megalomaniacal solipsist -- a man whose magical thinking allows him to live in a "peaceable kingdom" where he can rewrite the rules of nature and reprimand her creatures for being what they are. As King Lear would say, "That way madness lies."

It is one of the film's many ironies that when Treadwell actually comes upon what he assumes to be bear poachers, he consciously chooses to remain hidden. Apparently, he planned to report the incident: on camera he fastidiously notes the time (down to the 18th second!) when the filming took place. But one can only conclude that when it comes to real cases, the "Great Protector" is nothing more than the "Great Pretender."

To his credit, Treadwell and the photographic assistant he'd prefer us to forget about (to bolster his self-made-man-from-Australia myth) captured many extraordinary features of Alaskan wildlife that we might otherwise never see. At the same time, however, by becoming a leading character in the show, Treadwell may also be unwittingly falsifying what we see: is this how the animals would behave in the presence of chroniclers to whom they were *not* habituated or whose presence they could *not* detect? Maybe we need both kinds of documentation.

Perhaps most striking of all is the paradoxical sweet-and-sour view of nature that Treadwell repeatedly displays -- here infantilizing some of the most ferocious carnivores on the continent (often giving them cartoonish monikers like "Mr. Chocolate," as if naming were taming), there acknowledging the deadly danger of what he is doing. Both sides of the paradox fuel Treadwell's self-aggrandizement: he can treat these creatures like oversize pets while reveling in whatever special personal charm keeps him safe. In reality, he was just supremely lucky that before October 2003, he had encountered no bear desperately hungry enough to see him and girlfriend Amie Huguenard as a two-course meal. Treadwell may have died doing what *he* wanted to do (and he may well have wanted to die in just this way), but we have good reason to doubt Amie's assent to a comparable fate as the desirable way to go.

For me at least, the scene that most tellingly sums up Treadwell's faulty vision finds him crouched in a tent during a violent rainstorm. (He has, to his mind, virtually summoned up the deluge by registering a near-infantile tantrum of protest with all the higher powers, so that the rivers may flow abundantly and "his" starving bears may catch their fill of fish. Curiously, the same man who bewails cannibalized bear cubs and dead little foxes shows no sympathy for the salmon that will get crushed alive in the mouths of bears -- yet another example of Treadwell-style tunnel vision.) We soon see him snuggling a favorite toy from childhood that had first appeared only moments earlier during an interview with his grieving parents. And whaddya know? It's a teddy bear, that adorable stuffed animal that gives us all our first false lesson in bear lore. I suspect that Treadwell never fully accepted the shocking difference between real bears and their childhood impostors. Decades ago at the Denver Zoo, I saw a sign that offered a curt corrective to the Great TB Fallacy: "All bears are dangerous." You'd better believe it, Winnie-the-Pooh!

I think part of Treadwell believed that, but a stronger part didn't want this inconvenient fact to block his irrational impulse to "domesticate" an untamable force of nature to which native people (who have lived in bear country for millennia) have the good sense to give a wide berth of awe and respect. Neither boundless optimism nor American pioneering spirit nor Edenic wishful thinking can trump nature's rules of engagement. The natural world is a dense network of largely invisible trip wires: we humans have no foolproof sense for detecting whether we have transgressed another creature's invisible perimeter-alert system before we're too far inside to escape its tooth and claw. Nature responds simply and effectively to foolhardiness: her creatures devour the unwary and the unwise.

At one point during a manic tirade against the National Park Service, Treadwell screams, "Animals rule!" -- or something to that effect. Yes! But for all his immersion in the wild, the self-absorbed Treadwell never grasps the nature of Nature. Where wild animals rule, tread well and wisely -- or not at all.

I liked this movie but I have to agree with all the reviews (who rate it both good and bad) that say Timothy Treadwell is emotionally and mentally ill. It's true: the most amazing thing about his story was that he wasn't killed and eaten any sooner.

I sympathize with the family and friends for their loss, but I can't gloss over what a crazy, grandstanding and ultimately suicidal "mission" this was. He wasn't exactly Diane Fossey, who literally fought poachers off the mountain gorillas in Rwanda--these bears were in a state park.

Absolutely NOTHING in science or life tells Treadway or anyone else that it's safe to live with bears. He ventures into the wild and lives in a constant state of delusion, even as the bears kill and eat each other, his cute little foxes, the adorable little cubs. As Herzog points out, there's nothing to support Treadway's fantasy world of harmony in the bloody Alaskan wilderness.

GRIZZLY MAN is a fascinating story but I have to agree with the reviews which compare the interviews with BEST IN SHOW or A MIGHTY WIND.

(If you were fascinated by this story, check out the book INTO THE WILD, about another young man who disappeared and died in the Alaskan bush in an attempt to live off the land. GORILLAS IN THE MIST is both a book and a movie about Diane Fossey, another controversial person who fought on behalf of endangered animals).