Wolfpack, The

There are two main aspects to a documentary – its subject matter and its treatment. In terms of the former The Wolfpack is remarkable. Director Crystal Moselle was walking down a New York street one day when she saw a group young men in Reservoir Dogs style attire of black suits, white shirts, black ties and sunglasses coming toward her. Intrigued, she introduced herself and so met the Angulo brothers, young men who had grown up sequestered in their housing commission apartment by their obsessively controlling father.  Never allowed to associate with anyone but their family members they lived entirely vicariously through watching and re-enacting classic Hollywood movies.  When Moselle met them they were just making their first tentative steps into the real world.

Tyro director Moselle who has had some experience working in film readily recognized a remarkable story and she was doubly lucky in that not only did the boys welcomed her into their world but gave her free access to archival video footage of their years growing up in what is effectively a scaled-down cult compound.  It’s fascinating material but clearly the problem with it for Moselle was what to do with it.

Here she is very equivocal. On the one hand she adopts a standard verité style, allowing the camera to record the boys as they show her how they re-enact their favourite films. They are impressively talented in this respect and, albeit in a small way, like one of their heroes, Quentin Tarentino, their obsessive love of movies fuels their own film-making projects. On the other hand Moselle struggles to know what to do with the undeniable weirdness of her material.  She imbues it with a sense of foreboding, intimating in the manner of Capturing The Friedmans perhaps physical abuse on the part of the boy’s father but this would-be narrative goes nowhere. Despite interviewing the nutty paterfamilias and his chronically shy wife, a pair of back-to-nature hippies who somehow got stranded in the bowels of Gommorah, and letting the boys express their repugnance for him, at the end of the day all she ends up with is an astonishingly sweet set of kids with an obsessive love of movies  and a couple of kookie parents.   

Perhaps indeed  that is all that there is to it, and that is in one sense, enough, but the art of documentary making is in the shaping of the material and here Moselle’s inexperience shows.

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