And yet, when director Werner Herzog dove in and edited the lush and calming Grizzly Man from 100 hours of an eccentric activist’s personal footage of bears in the wild, he sidestepped this instinctive human reaction to portray the bears as frighteningly predatory creatures, despite the fact that a grizzly slaughters and eats the film’s hero and his girlfriend.

The man under Herzog’s microscope is obsessive bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, who for 13 summers stalked Alaskan grizzlies like Philip Seymour Hoffman chasing tornadoes, gleefully risking his life to be nature’s voyeur and, ironically, to bond with them.

It’s Treadwell’s footage from the final few summers that Herzog molds into Grizzly Man, and although the film only exists because its main character got ripped to shreds during his expedition, Herzog refuses to make the animals the bad guys. Instead, Grizzly Man’s villain is its hero, Treadwell, a love-him-and-hate-him amateur zoologist with a deep affection for bears and their habitats.

Herzog is in complete control of Grizzly Man, seamlessly blending Treadwell’s footage with interviews of family, friends, and a few quasi-enemies, backing it all with an incredible bluegrass-inspired score, and even narrating it himself in a soothing German accent, noting when he agrees and disagrees with Treadwell like one might do in a thesis on the life of a philosopher.

Treadwell was indeed a strange guy, part hippie environmentalist and part egotistical self-promoter. He faked a lot of the footage, doing up to 15 takes of a simple intro and pretending like he was alone, when his girlfriend was usually right behind the camera. Herzog doesn’t hide these facts, and refrains from glamorizing or judging Treadwell outright, inserting the perfect amount of sympathy with reserved investigation of his troubled past, which included stints as a failed actor and drug addict. Most surprisingly, he includes Treadwell’s generally insane, but oft inspired, private rants about the park service, women, gay people, and most often, hirsute omnivores.

In a powerful moment, Treadwell confesses that his life as a severe alcoholic was redeemed by these bears, which saved him from this disease. It’s calculated melodrama, of course, like the Crocodile Hunter minus the comfy truckload of anti-venom-wielding corporate sponsors, but at heart, Treadwell really loves the bears, and wants to protect them from poachers, the government and themselves, even if that meant giving up his life in the process, which he reminds us all too frequently is a definite possibility.

Herzog had numerous excuses to delve into the bears and drop the Man part off the title, including the fact that Treadwell’s death came at the hands of an older, drastically starving bear. Connections with the two legendary, desperate man-eating lions of Tsavo, on record as killers of an unbelievable 140 people in the late 19 th century, could have spun the film in a whole new survival-driven, nature doc direction.

But Herzog keeps the bears in the supporting category, spending more time examining Treadwell’s quirky and flamboyant personality, which makes him empathetic to few outside the hyper-green crowd, and setting him up as both the film’s flawed protagonist and sympathetic caution tale. The result is a deep and unflinchingly honest portrait, a skilled throwback to the days when a documentary on society didn’t have to come packaged with a Xanax and a picket sign.

-Shawn Wines