Spirituality and parrots
Toolbox
By Glenn Whipp Los Angeles Daily News - Published: June 4, 2005
"I'm not an eccentric," Mark Bittner explains in the opening moments of the wonderful documentary "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill." Bittner blanches at the word, and you could see how a guy who has spent a chunk of his life feeding birds and cataloging their existence might be a tad defensive over people getting the wrong idea.
In the same way, you shouldn't get the wrong idea about this film. "Wild Parrots" isn't some namby-pamby nature movie about a modern-day St. Francis of San Francisco. Yes, we watch Bittner befriend a flock of birds near his Telegraph Hill home, feed them and love them. And, boy, if the whole thing doesn't make you a little misty-eyed by the end.
But filmmaker Judy Irving is clear-eyed when it comes to the harsh realities of nature. The hawks are always circling and the birds (cherry-headed conures, to be precise) themselves can be incalculably cruel. There's no Disney-style anthropomorphism here.
Yet, these birds slowly emerge as sharply defined individuals, creatures that we come to know much more intimately than most characters in Hollywood movies. They mate, they fight, they play, they pick on the less fortunate, they live in fear, they ignore another conure simply because he has blue feathers instead of red.
The long-haired Bittner had lived in San Francisco's North Beach area for 14 years as a homeless person, looking for spirituality and meaning. Bittner's curiosity, along with his penchant for not following the society's conventions and his love for the eco-friendly author Gary Snyder (who shares with Bittner a belief in Buddhist tenets) led him to the birds, which ultimately put him on a path where he found contentment in a number of other areas.
Bittner's journey and its surprising destinations and revelations are among the film's many pleasures. The movie builds a momentum, moving from the facts about the flock to Bittner's inscrutable connection to them to something almost spiritual, something anyone who has ever loved an animal or searched for a purpose in this mixed-up world can understand. This is a beautiful movie.