Every Little Thing Review
Nestled on a hill in the heart of Los Angeles is a place for tiny, magical creatures to recover from their life-threatening injuries, all under the care of one woman. Every Little Thing follows Terry Masear as she looks after her latest hummingbird charges, trying to fix them up enough so they can fly free once again.
We follow the stories of various hummingbirds across Sally Aitken’s lovely documentary. Amongst their colourful number are Cactus, so named because he fell into one and got covered in spines; Sugar Baby, whose human ‘finders’ foolishly washed her in sticky sugar water, disabling her ability to fly; and Mikhail, who has a thing for the clearly uninterested Alexa. Each of these tiny creatures is beautiful, and full of personality, which makes it all the more heartbreaking that a great many of them die before they can be released back into the wild.
For a while, when it becomes apparent that we aren’t going to learn very much at all about Terry, or the logistics of her operation, it’s a little frustrating. It’s hard to imagine watching Every Little Thing and not wanting to set up a hummingbird rescue centre yourself (sure, hummingbirds don’t come to the UK, but that shows just how transportive the documentary is!). So not hearing about how she came to that most unusual of occupations, how she pays the bills, how much help she has… that stoking of curiosity and the refusal to satiate it certainly risked becoming unsatisfying.
And yet the more the film progresses, the less quotidian details like that seem to matter. Every Little Thing is the ultimate in ‘show, don’t tell’ documentaries; in seeing firsthand how carefully Terry treats her miniature charges, how deft she is at dealing with the problems that arise (her gentle recapturing of an exhausted escapee is a particularly indelible moment), and how furious she is at the way the thoughtless actions of humans endanger the hummingbirds, we learn all we need to about her as a person.
Early in Every Little Thing, we are told that Terry has received over twenty thousand calls at her sanctuary since 2008, from people who have found an ailing hummingbird and want to learn how to help. As well as counteracting those times when humans have made things worse – see the sad story of Sugar Baby – the sheer number who have come to Terry for guidance offers hope in another way. Throughout the film, we see her dedication to teaching the finders not only what to do in their present situation, but why what they’re doing is important, and how to help if they find another bird in a similar predicament in the future. Her ‘teach a man to fish…’ attitude is inspiring; little by little, she’s been building a whole community of caregivers, who can then in turn share their knowledge with others. It’s quite a legacy.
Every Little Thing is an awe-inspiring reminder that, in a world that can seem impossibly vast and terrifying, sometimes we need to focus on the small things to remember what life is all about.
★★★★★
