The Air Is Tonic

“Wheel of Time,” the second of three documentaries by Werner Herzog to open this summer, is a becalmed interlude. Its predecessor, “The White Diamond,” was a vertiginous essay on flight, folly, and the burden of dreams. The upcoming “Grizzly Man” remembers a New Age preservationist who was devoured by a bear. The subject this time is monumentally tranquil: Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage and ritual. This being a Herzog picture, however, spectacle is everywhere.Buddha was enlightened in Bodh Gaya, India, and each year the faithful flood the drab village with an ocean of crimson robes. It is, for some, an extreme act of pilgrimage. A close-cropped monk of evident enlightenment (or maybe just exhaustion) journeyed a distance of more than 3,000 miles in a sustained pattern of bowing, kneeling, and flat-out prostration. He arrived after more than six and a half years and has walnut size calluses to prove it.Another group of pilgrims practice this devotional callisthenic before the Tree of Enlightenment with a goal of reaching 100,000 repetitions. “It will take the fittest of them six weeks,” Mr. Herzog explains in his inimitably portentous manner. Elsewhere, two monks engage in heated public debate over aspects of the “two realities”: appearance and emptiness. Mr. Herzog relishes his observation that “by lunch break, the debate remains inconclusive.”Interviews with His Holiness the Dalai Lama are memorable for their infectious good spirit, but the most compelling part of this first section captures the handcrafting of a mind-boggling multicolored sand mandala. A focal point for spiritual reflection, the mandala abstracts several hundred divinities in a vortex design of great intricacy and elegance. It is a two-dimensional representation in space of a multidimensional complex of ideas in the mind. Mr. Herzog seems drawn to it as a metaphor for his own art.There has always been a spiritual dimension to Mr. Herzog’s work, a questing toward the infinite and ineffable. His forceful mind spins its wheels a bit when confronted with collective bliss. He thrives on tension, and gets none of it here; there’s no way to impose his gigantic personality on something so imperturbably placid, no matter how exotic the display. In “The White Diamond,” each scene functions as a hard, brilliant facet of the overall design; the travelogue mode of “Wheel of Time” is a looser, more nebulous affair.Given the anti-ego bent of the subject, it’s appropriate Mr. Herzog’s strong personality should recede. Yet there’s no mistaking the driver of “Wheel,” with its jaw-dropping panoramas and Herzogian tableaux. At the foot of Mount Kailash in far western Tibet, a ragtag assembly of pilgrims brave high altitudes and freezing temperatures to honor the sacred site. Mr. Herzog notes that every year several people die, then sets his camera on their slow circling of the great mountain’s base.In the odd, final stretch of the film, Mr. Herzog goes to Graz, Austria, where the passionate local Buddhist community has persuaded the Dalai Lama to host an important ceremony. Strange sight, these white Europeans turned out like monks, rapt in meditation with headphones on. One expects the camera to scrutinize them further – it has gazed at length on the handsome particularity of Tibetan faces – but Mr. Herzog leaves them be. He draws no conclusions and offers no comment.“Wheel of Time” is content to show: What could someone like Mr. Herzog presume to tell? There was a bold, controlling intelligence at work in “The White Diamond”; here there is simple respect and awe. That’s wonderful, but it also makes for more conventional documentary. Take a breath – the air is tonic – and gird yourself for “Grizzly Man.”

The Air Is Tonic

The Air Is Tonic

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