In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our staff favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
#77 - Project Grizzly
The world would be a dull place without misfit dreamers like Troy Hurtubise: scrap metallist in his day job,
inventor and ‘close-quarter bear researcher’ by divine inspiration. Peter Lynch’s documentary, Project Grizzly, charting Hurtubise’s quest to build a suit capable of withstanding an all out assault at the claws of a grizzly bear, is as compelling as it is peculiar.
Watching the film’s hero getting hit with everything from trucks to tree trunks, there’s more than a dash of Jackass (or Cap’n Video if you prefer) about Project Grizzly. However, so straight-faced is the strangeness of Hurtubise’s world that comparison to Spinal Tap seems more appropriate. As the realisation dawns of the pure futility of his endeavour, the comedy takes a turn for the mildly tragic, with a surprisingly generous dose of emotional depth.
Just what does drive a man to spend seven years of his life and $150,000 on constructing the ultimate bear suit? To hear Troy Hurtubise tell the story, it was surviving a brush with a grizzly at the age of twenty while hiking in British Columbia that motivated him to build an increasingly indestructible suit (it’s fire retardant too, because of the flame-thrower bears, you see) in order to relive the experience.
Hurtubise is charming, intelligent and good-natured throughout, and while there’s no reason to doubt the veracity of his mythmaking – for whatever reason Troy thinks he is making this suit – the story behind the story suggests otherwise.
Director Lynch and editor Caroline Christie deserve great credit as documentarians, balancing their understanding and respect for their subject whilst allowing him to fully come to life on camera; and boy, does Hurtubise love the camera. The only moment Hurtubise stops talking is when he meditates before practicing Kung Fu in the wilderness dressed only in a white, one-piece thermal with a red beret.
Is our hero a kind of land-loving Jacques Cousteau, or Don Quixote lost in The Great White North? As unrealistic as his mission appears, somehow hope remains in Troy’s pathological determination to succeed. The roots of his obsessive compulsion run deep.
It becomes quickly apparent as Hurtubise recounts the story of his anthropologist father reconstructing an Iroquois village – hand-chopping over 1,000 polls – that this remarkable monument is not only a profound influence, but a long shadow across his life. While Troy references his father many times, we never meet the source of one of the most elaborate Oedipal complexes committed to film – it’s not without reason that Hurtubise refers to the grizzly bear as “The Old Man.”
Before you know it, Project Grizzly becomes an exploration of masculinity, paternity, and the relationship between Canadians and the wilderness. Extra points if you spot Lynch’s La Dolce Vita reference in the opening scene.
See, and you just thought it was a movie about a crazy man and his indestructible bear suit.
Check out what Troy did next: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPS2l5fQ55A
-Scott Henderson
"A bear of a movie that had audiences howling with laughter." (The Toronto Star)
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.