Why is Grizzly Man my second-favorite film of 2005? Because it is the only movie that I have seen this year that haunts me. Werner Herzog’s documentary about a man who spends his summers living with grizzly bears seems on first viewing like little more than a simple and somewhat sloppy piece of exploitation mocking a sad and disturbed individual. It’s almost hard to take seriously, because it seems so much like another one of Christopher Guest’s brilliant mockumentaries: loser lives with wild grizzly bears, loser gets eaten by wild grizzly bears. Equally problematic is Herzog’s insistence on injecting his own editorial take on the material into the film. His musings can be off-putting to viewers who would rather make up their own minds about what the material means. Even for those who can accept his presence, Herzog’s tone at first mystifies: Is he actually taking Timothy Treadwell seriously, or is he mocking him? It’s not until the final portion of the film that Herzog makes it plain: He sees Treadwell as a man who is tragically deluded, living in a self-created fantasy world that ignores the claws of the real world surrounding him. It is here that the film finally transcends itself, creating, like Moby-Dick or Wall Street, something iconic. Treadwell becomes a symbol of dangerous naïveté, unfortunately possessing just enough competence to screw up more than just his own life. Because Treadwell does not go down alone; he takes his girlfriend with him into the jaws of the vicious bear that finally does him in. He also, it is pointed out, poses a unique danger to the bears, which he is allegedly trying to protect. By acclimatizing the bears to the presence of humans, he is destroying their better sense that tells them to fear humans. In one scene, a bear cub that has grown used to Treadwell saunters up to a group of kayakers. The kayakers throw large rocks at the bear, much to Treadwell’s dismay. But like his own death and the death of his girlfriend, this problem that so outrages him is one that he has brought on himself by not understanding the world in which he lives—a message that resonates in an all-too-timely way yet will no doubt resonate for new audiences far into the future.

Grizzly Man achieves a significance far beyond any light-hearted nature show about penguins, and it is the easily the best documentary of 2005.

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