Peter Bradshaw on Grizzly Man

Was Timothy Treadwell an inspired radical operating outside the academic naturalist establishment - or a pain in the neck with personal issues? A little of both, of course. He 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.

-- Peter Bradshaw reviews Grizzly Man (screended at SFC 19/01/06) in today's UK Guardian Film & Music Weekly.