The Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle’s debut documentary film, opens with a shot of the New York City skyline at twilight as seen through a fence. Considering the subject of the film, the mostly shut-in Angulo family, this image grows heavy with significance as their story is gradually revealed. The Angulo children are made up of six brothers (Bhagavan, Govinda, Jagadisa, Krsna, Mukunda, and Narayana) and one sister (Vishnu), who is rarely featured on camera, even though it is explained she is “special.”
Growing up in a small Lower East Side apartment, the Angulo kids were home-schooled and sheltered from the outside world by a megalomaniacal yet insecure father, an immigrant from Peru who ascribed to Hare Krishna beliefs. Fueled by a paranoia of society and their surrounding metropolis, the Angulo parents were terrified of the dangers that may be waiting in the mean streets of New York. There was even one year when the children were never allowed to leave their apartment at all. Nonetheless, the world seeped its way inside, oddly enough, at the hands of their father who showed them movie after movie after movie. The boys boast that their film collection includes some 5,000 VHS and DVD titles.
Intermixing her own primarily apartment-bound footage with home videos taken throughout the years when the kids were all very young, Moselle pieces together a story that is at once shocking, moving, and an ode to the miraculous power of cinema.
One of the sons says about movies that “If I didn’t have movies life would be pretty boring, And I wouldn’t have a point to go on, you see.” And another brother claims: “It makes me feel like I’m living, sort of.” These are simple enough sentences that cut deep not only because they come out of the mouths of teenage boys, who should have more than movies to live for, but because these are likely not alien thoughts to anyone with a cinephilic tendency. You don’t have to have been shut away in an apartment with the key to the outside world guarded by your father (this in itself sounds like a dark fairy tale that is plum cinematic material, and, as the existence of The Wolfpack proves, certainly is) to be able to register with a painful pang how wonderful and terrible it can be to live your life through cinema.
For the boys, films had to serve as facsimiles for life experiences. The brothers would transcribe the dialogue and then re-stage the films (quite well and creatively – with homemade costumes and their own riffs and mimicry of characters). Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Dark Knight – their repertoire reveals a predilection for violent, darker films, which cannot be brushed away by a nod to the fact that yes, teenage boys have a tendency to gravitate towards such material. This seems to point to an uneasy truth at the necessary release of anger and frustration at living lives given little literal (and not) space to develop.
In 2010, one of the boys decided to finally break free (taking a walk around the neighborhood while rather humorously – and free from any dramatic or ironic intent – wearing a homemade replica of Michael’s mask from Halloween so that no one would recognize him). After that moment, the boys started going out again and again. And one of the most poignant moments in the film comes when the six of them go to a movie theater for the first time to see David O. Russell’s The Fighter. The boys are visibly moved by this experience – the act of seeing a film in a theater for the first time taking on a holy and hallowed air that is a powerful antidote to those cynical about the theatergoing experience.
It would have been so easy to turn the patriarch into the tyrannical monster of the film. And, as interviews with the boys reveal, there was quite a bit of abuse that fell upon them as they were growing up. If their father put them in a room, they were not allowed to leave until he said it was okay. He was the only one who had a key to the front door – even their mother was not granted that privilege. By the time we see the father in the present day, he is a sunken recluse who spends most of the time being camera-shy, drunk, and at this point wary of his own children. But Moselle is never unfair to him and though most of what we know about him come from the words of his children – words that, although sometimes harsh and embittered, are never hateful – he is given the space to explain his parenting choices and comes off sounding more lost and delusional than intentionally wicked.
The Wolfpack could have only been crafted by a documentarian who had the complete trust of her subjects. It is a thrilling testament to the power of cinema delivered both in form (as a piece of great cinema) and content (the story of lives saved by the movies).
