MOVIE REVIEW : Epic of Nature’s Lost Innocence

In a world squandering its natural resources and slaughtering its wildlife, we sometimes sentimentalize over the carnage. As we strip the land, we mourn its passing. As we kill off one species after another, we cluck, often impotently, over their destruction.

Remarkably, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s new film, “The Bear” (opening throughout San Diego County on Friday), avoids most of these sentimental traps. Based on a 1916 children’s book by the American naturalist James Oliver Curwood, it’s the story of two bears--a fierce grizzly and a lovable cub--pursued implacably by two human hunters in the Canadian Rockies.

And though the outline of the movie’s story--the cub Youk losing its mother in a landslide triggered by her addiction to honey, its introduction to the wounded grizzly Kaar and their shifting relationship with the relentless hunters--may suggest a male-bonding version of “Bambi,” the material never gets weepy or cloying. Annaud and his collaborators charge it with a sweep and exhilaration startling for a family-oriented movie. You’d have to go back to the island section of Carroll Ballard’s 1979 “The Black Stallion” to find something comparable.

Part of that exhilaration comes from the landscapes. Inspired by the paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Caspar Friedrich, Annaud shot much of “The Bear” in the Bavarian Alps, in a spectacular environment of 10,000-foot-high peaks, snowy slopes and pine forests. The cinematographer, the great color stylist Philippe Rousselot (“Diva,” “The Emerald Forest”), bathes them in frosty, clear light, an almost glacial purity and depth.

Some of the exhilaration comes from the astonishing empathy the movie develops with and between the bears--partly, of course, through sheer trickery (the many dubbed yaps and yelps of adorable Youk), but also through staggering work by trainers Doug and Lynn Seus and Clint Youngreen. When you watch Youk waving goodby to some human friends, craning to get a better look and then slumping disconsolately to the ground, you never think of how he is being manipulated. The action and the shot have an almost magical rightness.

And much of the charge comes simply from the movie’s philosophy, the reverence for life in the Curwood quote--”The greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live”--used as the epigraph. The film makers involve you with the animals, make you see the world through their eyes, romping with them, running fearfully or attacking in anger, mourning death or curling up gratefully together in the chilly darkness--even, in some surreal sequences, dreaming their dreams.

Equally, we get the viewpoint of the two hunters (Jack Wallace and Tcheky Karyo). These men aren’t disembodied villains. Their pursuit of Kaar comes not through viciousness but vendetta and pride; they want to avenge the horses and dogs he has clawed or killed. He is also, for them both, a symbol of prowess and mystical strength, like the prey in Faulkner’s “The Bear.”

Kaar (played by the Montana-based Kodiak, Bart) becomes like the master warrior of a Kurosawa film. When he rubs his back magisterially against a swaying tree, it’s a gesture of gaudy machismo not unlike Toshiro Mifune’s shoulder twitch in “Yojimbo.” By contrast, the gray, tender little Youk (played by the French cub, Douce) is an orphaned mite lost in a beautiful, threatening world, like the child protagonists of many European art films. He is the quintessential innocent, watching wide-eyed the sports and swaggering of Kaar.

Annaud has a taste for epic subjects. He is a flamboyant visual stylist who is drawn to vast or elemental stories: the World War I anti-war, anti-racist fable of “Black and White in Color”; the dawn-of-man picaresque of “Quest for Fire”; the medieval eschatological murder mystery of “The Name of the Rose.” But Annaud doesn’t treat these subjects solemnly. He makes grandiose images--and sometimes bizarrely baroque ones, like the shot of the moon from a bullet’s-eye view in “The Bear.” But there is also a humorous edge in his visuals, a childlike wonder, a witty relish in the absurd mechanisms of man viewed against the awesome unity of nature.

In “The Bear,” he gets the “Once upon a time . . .” inflection of a good Spielberg or Disney picture, but it’s steeped in hints of real horror or darkness. “Quest,” “Rose” and “The Bear” were all written by Roman Polanski’s regular scenarist, Gerard Brach--an agoraphobic who has not left his Parisian apartment in two decades--and the sense of entrapment, sexy absurdity or hip paranoia in his Polanski films isn’t entirely absent here. (There’s even some bear-faced voyeurism.) In a way, the Annaud-Brach movies are like those glass balls that contain immaculate little worlds. Despite the illusion of a limitless universe, they’re confined, stylized, imprisoned.

These hints of bleakness don’t dampen the joyous surge of the movie’s climax. They heighten it. There has been a glut of animal movies in the last few years. But, of them all, “The Bear” (MPAA-rated PG, despite some violence and bear bawdiness)--sympathetically imagined, meticulously organized and grandly executed--is easily the period’s epic. These movie makers want you to feel the thrill of life, of all life. At their best, they do.

‘THE BEAR’

A Tri-Star release of a Renn Production. Producer Claude Berri. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud. Script Gerard Brach. Camera Philippe Rousselot. Editor Noelle Boisson. Production Design Toni Ludi. Music Philippe Sarde. Bear trainers Doug Seus, Lynn Sues, Clint Youngreen. Cast Bart, Douce, Jack Wallace, Tcheky Karyo, Andre Lacombe.

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children).