By Steven Rosen

(This originally ran on IndieWire's Sundance Blog in January. Both films are now in theatrical release.)

When you see as many movies in as short a time as one does at Sundance, you start to make odd connections between them. Shared themes begin to emerge between the strangest cinematic bedfellows.

Like, for instance, Werner Herzog?s harrowing, sobering ?Grizzly Man? documentary and Mike Mills? offbeat, gently comic ?Thumbsucker,? adapted from a novel by Walter Kim. ?Grizzly Man? is in the World Documentary competition; ?Thumbsucker? in the American Dramatic section.

Both are about males who find comfort in the kind of familiar safe objects that insecure children traditionally use. Only they stick with it a little longer than society usually recommends. And, perhaps, they then transfer their needs onto something else ? something more dangerous.

In ?Thumbsucker,? of course, that object is a thumb. Seventeen-year-old Justin Cobb (Lou Pucci) still sucks it, although without a security blanket, especially when watching violent world news on the television. (He dreams of being a newscaster.)

His orthodontist (Keanu Reeves) tries to reassure him that it?s just a ?natural? substitute for his mother?s breast, although that seems to make Justin even more insecure and ashamed. ?It?s a wonder we ever quit,? the dentist says, and you hear Mills? (and Kim?s) message in those words.

However, Justin does quit with the help of prescription drugs for his attention-deficit disorder. He quickly becomes transformed, but not completely for the better. He becomes a champion debater, but his high-school coach (Vince Vaughn, in tortoise-shell eyeglasses) also believes he?s turned into a preening, manipulative ?monster.? The film, in its agreeable way, makes the point that as addictions go, there are worse things than thumbs.

For Timothy Treadwell, who is the ?Grizzly Man? of Herzog?s film, that familiar safe object is a teddy bear. We learn in an interview with his parents that teddy bears meant a lot to him as a child.

And we see in one shot that the adult Treadwell sentimentally kept one with him at the campsite in Alaska?s Katmai National Park and Reserve where he spent several months each year observing grizzlies in the wild. ?Observing? is too mild a word. Treadwell brought a seemingly spiritual sense of childlike wonder to his attempts to bond with these wild animals. And that brought him national renown.

But in 2003, a grizzly killed and ate him and his companion, Amie Huguenard. He left behind 100 hours of videotape ? much of it sometimes-compelling, sometimes-appalling monologues ? and Herzog has edited that into a film.

?I promised the bears that if I?d look over them, would they help me become a better person,? Treadwell says, at one point. He believes they answered him affirmatively. Herzog also adds his own narration, which is questioning of Treadwell?s basic assumptions but also charitable to his intentions.

There are many ways to interpret Treadwell?s life and cause, and the film ponders several. But one that I came away with was that he was a sentimentalist who perhaps brought too much of his feelings for those old teddy bears to these very strong, very unsentimental animals.