(USA, 84 min.)
Dir. Crystal Moselle
 |
| Krsna Angulo, Jagadisa Angulo, Bhagavan Angulo, Mukunda Angulo, Narayana Angulo and Govinda Angulo in The Wolfpack, a Video Services Corp release. Photo courtesy of Video Services Corp. |
The Angulo brothers had an unconventional upbringing: they
grew up in a cave. Their dad locked his six boys up away from the world, up
high in a New York City apartment, and refused to let them outside. They
experienced life through the light and images flickering throughout their drab,
dingy apartment. No, they don’t live in Plato’s cave—they just have the oddest,
most devoted film club ever caught on film. Yes, these six boys grew up on a
diet of Hollywood flicks and they learned about life through one outlet: the
movies.
Director Crystal Moselle gets some laudable access to the Angulo family and goes inside their apartment to film let the boys—Bhagavan, Govinda, Narayana, Mukunda, Krsna, and Jagadisa—star in their own film, The Wolfpack, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance this year. Moselle offers nearly five years’ worth of footage as she explores the unconventional upbringing forced upon the boys by their father, Oscar, as they watch movies and use film as a vehicle to explore the world that they know exists outside. They even escape the cave and venture out into the wilderness—it turns out that the world isn’t such a scary place. It’s a fascinating subject, like Nell meets Room meets the high school a/v club.
The Wolfpack looks
at this world within a world with an ethnographer’s eye as Moselle observes the
lifestyle and behaviour of a different pack of animals. An element of novelty
overrides The Wolfpack, though, and
the film invites equal parts of laughter and empathy. The boys are strange, but
the film never fully gets inside their heads even though the range of material
is intimate and expansive.
The boys, some of whom are young men, aren’t especially
different from everyday film geeks raised on David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino:
they love movies and they love to re-create their favourite films in between
bouts of discussing and debating the best that film has to offer. Many of these
re-creations of films like Reservoir Dogs
and Pulp Fiction, however, are
fastidiously spot-on since the boys have pored over these films so many times
that they’re like sacred texts to them. The performances and archival snippets
are oddities of ritual, play, and education. Above all, however, The Wolfpack shows how film has the
power to enlighten and inspire us: it’s an empowering force, as the boys grow
into prolific young artists who recognize the artifice of the world to which
their father confines them. If only the boys of The Wolfpack could meet Greg and Earl from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl!
The Wolfpack
smartly differs from other film geek narratives, however, since the boys reveal
that they clearly see the distinction between the fiction they watch in the
movies and the pseudo-reality of the world they live in. Unlike other stories
and studies that suggest that lovers of escapism fail to distinguish art from
life, The Wolfpack lets the subjects
draw a fine line between life and escapism. This revelation, which comes
relatively early in the film, furthers the boys’ ability to see that the
sheltered world of the apartment is just as fake as Gotham City.
This revelation comes off as rather muted since Moselle’s
study of the boys began after they started venturing out into the world on
their own. The film lacks the cathartic moment in which the boys learn that the
world they live in is a lie, and the more one realizes that the action Moselle
captures isn’t an entirely candid glimpse into a world of blissful and tragic
ignorance, The Wolfpack begins to
feel more and more like a dramatic reconstruction. This gap ironically situates
the film into a kind of ethnographic filmmaking à la Nanook of the North in which shots and actions are largely staged
for dramatic effect. The dramatic recreations of the boys’ favourite movies
somewhat lose their meaning when one realizes that the camera comes into the
home long after the end point of the Plato’s cave parable.
There’s a lot more to this story than one sees in this doc.
Perhaps it’s Moselle’s introduction to the boys after they themselves have
answered the biggest questions of their upbringing—she encountered them during
one of their early jaunts outside—that gives the film its unsatisfying lack of
an emotional pull. Alternatively, the film mostly frustrates for the questions
that Moselle doesn’t ask the boys or their parents. The Wolfpack impresses for the access that the Angulos provide into
their lives, but this compromise sometimes keeps the study too safe and
respectful: only once does the filmmaker ask Oscar—a drunken tyrant who refuses
to work because of alleged government conspiracies—if he was too hard on his
family and has any regrets. The film also misses a terrific opportunity with
the boys’ mother, Susanne, who seems to be waking up to the fact that the world
she and Oscar created for the kids is much worse than the world from which they
try to shelter them. (One notable phone call with her mother never sees further
consideration.) There’s a great thread with Susanne that never quite gets the
attention that it needs. Why these parents want to shelter themselves from
society is a question in itself that demands a film.
The Wolfpack
nevertheless lets the Angulo boys star in their own movie and the result
provides a kind of poetic justice to the childhood they never really had. The
film shows the power of movies to shape, entertain, and inspire as they boys
share their own funny home movies and evolve into future filmmakers.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Wolfpack screens in Ottawa at The ByTowne until July 14.
