Sundance Film Festival

The Wolfpack Is a Problematic Documentary Rather Than a Quirky Delight

Given its overuse, the word "problematic" can seem so mealy-mouthed and equivocal. Yet "problematic" is the word that came to mind after I watched Crystal Moselle's documentary The Wolfpack, which comes out today in New York and Toronto and opens in more theaters across the country next week.

The Wolfpack chronicles the lives of the Angulo brothers, six teenage boys and young men who live in Manhattan. For most of their lives, their parents forbade them from leaving their Lower East Side apartment. The six brothers and their sister were homeschooled and prevented from seeing the outside world. While there's a specter of physical and psychological abuse throughout the film, the Angulo boys find an oddly joyous outlet via home video recreations of movies such as Reservoir Dogs and The Dark Knight. Moselle captures the Angulo brothers just as they are beginning to get out of the apartment and assert their own agency.

There have been a few accusations that the film is a fabrication and that the story that Moselle found was too riveting to be true. That's not an issue to me. Moselle explained her filmmaker process and how she first encountered the Angulo brothers in various interviews (this interview Moselle did with Tasha Robinson of The Dissolve is quite good), so I don't think matters of fabrication need to be answered any further. What I found problematic was the film's form of presentation, which is both intriguing and yet incomplete. It leaves so many questions about the Angulo family either unanswered or seemingly unasked, and it made me wonder about the difficult and delicate relationship that documentarians have with their subjects when the subject matter is troubling.

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From a distance, the situation of the Angulo brothers sounds like a potential casserole of indie movie quirkiness. Their forced internment in the apartment, their positivity in the face of the situation, their recreations of popular films, the verite style in which the documentary is shot--it's like some mash-up of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Be Kind Rewind, and Grey Gardens. I sense the Angulo's film recreations helped endear The Wolfpack to the Sundance crowd, and there is something oddly quaint about seeing boys do a scene-for-scene remake of The Dark Knight Rises in homemade cardboard costumes. But that quirkiness and lightness is at odds with the grimness of the boys' situation.  This is an intentional tension in the film's tone, and while a fascinating disjunction on one level, it took me aback and I'm still not sure how to feel about it.

The film recreation aspect seems like a feel-good selling point for The Wolfpack, though it's just one facet of the Angulo brothers' much more complicated interior lives. They're redoing a Tarantino movie with cardboard guns--how cute. They've been kept prisoner by a domineering and emotionally distant father--ummm, yeah. I kept wondering about the Angulos using film as a tool for socialization and whether or not it worked for them, and why their father who hated the violence and vice of the outside world would let them watch movies full of violence and vice (and then allow the boys to recreate it). There's so much to unpack and to explore that's glossed over. Though to be fair, all that material is so loaded and layered. Maybe a verite documentary can only delineate the broad contours of interior lives rather than the various textures and fine details--character sketches rather than full portraits.

The entire relationship between the boys and their parents similarly gets the contour treatment. While the boys' mother Susanne seems warm and receptive (though not all there), their father, Oscar, is cold and hesitant about saying much of anything. Before Oscar winds up on camera, he's viewed furtively. The film's structured in a way that suggests Moselle, through greater interaction with the boys and Susanne, is slowly earning the limited trust of the Angulo patriarch. Oscar sticks mostly to his room, a presence more than a person, which seems like a perfect analog to the emotional and psychological relationship that he has with his sons, his daughter, and his wife. We never get close enough to Oscar for a full sense of his motives. One wants to ask Oscar--confront him, even--with so many questions. Why did you do this to your children? How could you put a family through this? Oscar isn't one to answer, and maybe to maintain access to the boys and their story, Moselle had to be delicate in asking these questions, or even just determining whether or not these questions could be asked.

There's even more to the Angulo story that The Wolfpack either leaves unanswered or unasked. In the Dissolve interview linked to above, for instance, I learned that the Angulo daughter has Turner syndrome (TS), which is similar to Down syndrome, and I wondered about the challenges of raising a young girl with special needs in such an enclosed and difficult environment. That's never brought up in the film by the Angulo boys. I mentioned the issue of physical and psychological abuse as a specter, and that's precisely what the elephant in the room remains. While abuse is alluded to, I'm not sure if allusion is enough given how serious the matter is and how that must have been part of Oscar's power over his children and his wife. Late in the film, Susanne is speaking to her parents whom she's lost touch with over the years, and I wondered "What's the story there?" By the end of The Wolfpack, I'm still left wondering.

Moselle's approach, both distanced and delicate, may also have been her way to protect the Angulo brothers from her own opinion of their upbringing. Being too forceful with these boys and young men, or leading them with her own observations about their family situation might have done more damage than good. Instead of molding or training the Angulos to some emotional confrontation with their father, Moselle seems like she just wants to observe, to let them be themselves, and to let nature run its course. The old line is that sun is the best disinfectant, and by staying out of the way as much as possible, Moselle might simply be letting the Angulo family get some much needed light. Though to that, with so many questions to ask after seeing the film, the scrutiny on the Angulos will necessarily increase. Their story is so fascinating and it's also a work-in-progress, much like the children's personalities.

It's been said that we're in a golden age of documentaries. The Wolfpack is just one of three non-fiction films coming out this summer that will likely be on people's minds come Oscar time. (The other two are Matthew Heineman's Cartel Land and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence.) I go back and forth about my feelings over The Wolfpack, yet I think it belongs in this company. On the one hand, The Wolfpack is a glimpse into these people's lives with an approach that leads to a number of problems, and yet it's precisely because of this approach that I can't stop thinking about the film. I can't stop thinking about the Angulo family either, for that matter, and that may be the sure sign that Moselle's film is ultimately a problematic success.

by Hubert Vigilla