"Grizzly Man."

I finally got the chance to see "Grizzly Man," the one current movie that I really cared about. I loved it. Timothy Treadwell — now there is a character! He'd have been a terrible character in a work of fiction, though, I think, because he was just too strange to believe, too multidimensional, and too silly for his tragedy.

And the story would have been worse as fiction, because things that had to be left mysterious would have been dramatized in a fiction movie. The difficulty in seeing who Amie Huguenard was gave the movie a deep poignancy. How entirely different it would have been if we had seen Amie and Timothy expressing their emotions to each other! How did he get her to go there with him and why did she stay, even when she had one last chance to run?

Like Amie, the grizzly bears are mysterious and unknowable, as the material is ultimately presented by the director, Werner Herzog (who says in the voiceover "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder"). But Treadwell thought he understood the bears and that they could understand him too.

Our wonderful, thrilling central character lived a wild life, figured out how to do some amazing things, but got some things dramatically wrong. Who was he? Was he mostly a frustrated actor, who took to making his own insanely grandiose movie after he came in second in the casting for the "Cheers" role they gave to Woody Harrelson? Did he go back in the end to die out there?