We’re conditioned to think of nature documentaries as educational — probably because we watch them in school — but I think they’re more properly understood as generators of awe. You can’t easily see a cheetah or an octopus or an eagle in the wild, at least not for very long, but in a good movie you get to both observe and marvel.
“Every Little Thing” (in theaters) is mostly a nature documentary, this time about hummingbirds. Even if you regularly see hummingbirds hovering around your bird feeder, the naked eye can’t really see their wings flapping because, as the film’s main human subject, Terry Masear, points out, they beat 50 times per second, a fact that makes the birds seem like something out of “magical realism.” It’s why we find them so enchanting, she says: “How can something fly vertical, sideways, backward and upside down and not trigger those ideas, those feelings in people? There’s nothing else like them.”
Masear herself is both magical and unusual. “Every Little Thing” centers on the Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue, a rehabilitation center she’s run since 2004 for injured, sick and abandoned hummingbirds. They come to her mostly via people who discover the birds in their yards or a park. Her hotline, both phone and text, seems very busy.
The director, Sally Aitken, unfolds the narrative gently; it’s a soothing film, even though it often deals with somber themes. Masear tells her own life story in bits and pieces, slowly revealing that in her younger years, she experienced chaos, abuse and addiction. “Maybe that’s the reason that I came to the hummingbirds,” she muses. Those experiences developed in her an empathy for suffering that someone with a less painful past might not naturally have.
We also watch Masear operating the rescue center and, with immense care, tending the birds, which all have names, including Raisin, Cactus, Sugar Baby and Charlie. She knows their personalities, their likes and dislikes, their proclivities. She mentions to a hotline caller that she is without children, then stops and corrects herself: She has the hummingbirds. They mean everything to her, whether she’s nursing them back to health or, with sadness, burying their small bodies when they don’t make it.
Masear is a terrific documentary subject, but the hummingbirds are as well, and Aitken brings them close to us. Slow-motion shows their extraordinary wings in action and also reveals what Masear sees: individual personalities (birdinalities?) and quirks. The hummingbirds sometimes seem to be looking straight into the camera, fearless and free.
The subjects of “Every Little Thing” — which the final credits identify as “Terry Masear and wild friends” — do in fact produce awe, both for the birds’ remarkable bodies and Masear’s immense joy in caring for them. Her close attention for many years is clearly motivated by affection and by gratitude for this life work. They’re not just hummingbirds to her: They’re beings living on earth, neighbors to humans, a reason to be glad. As with most creatures, taking the time and expending the patience to see them up close only increases her love.
