One of the biggest docs to come out of Sundance this year was Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, a film that I was looking forward to screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. The Wolfpack is a stranger-than-fiction story of a family, mostly the kids, being sheltered from society except for their exposure to Hollywood films.
The focus of the film is on the Angelo brothers, six bright and kind boys who have essentially never left their housing project located on the lower east side of Manhattan. Outside of their mother, father and sister, the boys have no friends or acquaintances, they’ve been home schooled by their mother, and their only real exposure to the outside world has been through movies and looking out their windows. As you can imagine, there’s only so much you can do in your apartment, so the boys use their imagination and love of movies to recreate entire films using homemade props and costumes, they especially love Tarantino. Eventually, one of the boys escapes the apartment, transforming his life and shaking the foundation for the rest of his family, opening up a new world of possibilities and significant life changes.
To give you an idea as to how sheltered this family is, the most they’ve ever left the apartment is nine times in a year but there have been years in which they’ve never left their apartment. The only person that’s allowed to come and go is the father, who believes NYC is not a safe place, one might say he’s paranoid and way too overprotective. When you see the boys, it’s amazing they’re not any weirder or quirkier. All donning incredibly long hair and names derived from ancient Sanskrit, the brothers take their style cues from the thieves in Reservoir Dogs, wearing square black sunglasses, suits and ties and gangster trench coats. Outside of that, the guys are incredibly resourceful in the ways they go about entertaining each other and their cinematic recreations are pretty spot on for what they’re working with.
The film gives each brother an opportunity to share their thoughts on the family dynamic, thoughts on the outside world, and most notably, their mother and father. Mukunda Angulo is the one that gets the most attention though, he was the first one to leave the apartment and explore his area of the city. When he finally returns home, he decides to sever ties with his father, a Peruvian-born drunk who dislikes work and believes that he is like God, that he is enlightened. He provides insights that sparked the adventure revolution at home that lead to the brothers experiencing the outside world too. We get to witness them taking their first trip to the beach, seeing their first movie in a theater and other fascinating things that many people have done at incredibly young ages.
When you watch the film you can understand, to a certain degree, the benefits of being sheltered. These boys don’t have a fear of being embarrassed for doing what most people would see as quirky and odd. They see the world as a new opportunity to develop skills and express ideas that they’ve had with other people. They’ve developed strong brotherly ties, something not every family has, but other than that, you can clearly tell that this hermit-like experience has been an unfair struggle for them, but even more difficult for the mother. She’s stuck in the middle, loved by all of her sons, yet this mid-west woman who had travelled a lot at one point, wasn’t allowed to leave the apartment much and was at the mercy of her husband. SPOILER There’s a shocking scene at the end of the film where we witness her speak to her mom for the first time in 50 years and it had nothing to do with any hatred for each other. END SPOILER Imagine that. She provides some of the most insightful and interesting bits throughout the film.
While utterly fascinating, The Wolfpack could have been a stronger film. There’s a lot of questions that remain unanswered and Moselle could have certainly gone deeper or have been more exploratory with her subjects. The film tries to steer clear of darker areas and the ethics of sheltering children and instances of domestic violence, which I can understand since the film is trying to be more about freedom, discovery and coming-of-age. The issue is that these questions linger and leave us wondering. It’s impossible for us to forget them since they’re important and played a role in the upbringing of this clan. I also thought that the filmmakers completely disregarded the sister. I can’t recall her speaking in the film once and would have loved to get her opinion on the family situation. I also felt that there wasn’t enough insight from the father. It may have had to do with his inability to clearly articulate his opinion or if it was because he had been drinking but we never get a good idea as to when he would have allowed his children to venture out and assimilate into society.
Overall, The Wolfpack is definitely a doc worth checking out. It’s not that it’s amazing, it’s that the subject is incredibly fascinating. It’s hard to imagine a family of nine living in a NYC apartment and seven of them having little to no contact with the outside world for nearly their entire lives. The fact that all but the dad all still relatively down-to-earth human beings is mind blowing. This combination of intrigue mixed with the idea that Hollywood has been the Angelo brothers’ source of knowledge of the outside world is what makes this film accessible to both people that truly love cinema and those that are just interested in an interesting news story.
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