The Wolfpack is an extraordinary documentary, because its subject is extraordinary. The seven children, six sons and one daughter, of the Angulo family spent the majority of their lives inside a tiny apartment in the projects (subsidized housing) of New York City’s Lower East Side. It’s the kind of thing you imagine might be happening when you stare at the endless, anonymous skyline of New York, or any city. Director Crystal Moselle spotted the six sons on the street and befriended them through a mutual love of film, later making the documentary.
Film has been the Angulo brothers’ window into the world. For most of their lives, they have ventured outside just once a year; or maybe three times or no times at all, depending on their father’s inclination. “If I didn’t have movies life would be pretty boring,” one of the sons explains, “there wouldn’t be any point, to go on, you see. So movies opened up another world”. Much of their entertainment is drawn from acting out fictional film scenes: they transcribe movie scripts and make outfits and props from cereal boxes in a kind of double deferral from lived experience. This also probably explains why they are pretty comfortable in front of the camera, for adolescent boys who have spent most of their lives locked up. At one point their mother, Susanne, remarks that she thinks their exposure to film was maybe “too much” and might have given them unrealistic expectations. The documentary certainly poses the question of whether film has warped as well as enabled their adjustment to the world, especially as the films they watch seem fairly limited to American crime and horror genres (Christopher Nolan’s Batman, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the Godfather trilogy). There is a scene that acts as a metaphor for this collision between fiction and reality: the boys relate how one day a SWAT team raided the apartment for weapons, which were in fact cardboard guns, some of the boys’ props.
The other focus is the family dynamic, which develops as the film progresses. By the time Moselle met the brothers, the family’s strange upbringing had begun to unravel. Aged fifteen, the eldest son stole his father’s keys and walked out, which led to all the brothers leaving the apartment as they wished. The documentary follows them to the cinema and Coney Island in some of its most endearing scenes. We then delve more into the character of the father, who is a shadowy figure to begin with, as addicted to the screen as his sons. His hybrid personal philosophy is a combination of social protest by not working, raising his family as Hari Krishnas (the long hair and Reservoir Dogs aesthetic of his sons elicits quizzical looks from hostile New Yorkers), and anti-ideological. He proclaims that he doesn’t want them to be coerced by any society, religion, philosophy, etc., an ironic justification for the constraints he has placed on his family.
Susanne, the mother, is a much more relatable figure than the father: kind, loving towards her sons and beloved by them. She alludes to her confined role in the family, and the difficult position she has to negotiate between her husband and children. She was raised in the mid-west and desperately wanted them to grow up in a rural place – it is clearly devastating to her that they are instead in a tiny, wholly inorganic urban space. As his sons emerge into the world, the father, his power fading like some aging god, seems to have become rambling and reclusive, no longer having a say in the liberty of his sons. He has instilled them with a superior attitude towards the outside world, as well as fear, making their home an ivory tower as well as a prison. He is not presented as wholly unthreatening by any means: elliptical statements by his sons suggest the unforgivable. The sister is largely left out of the documentary, and one wonders whether her silence is a result of suffering some kind of trauma, and if the film is culpable of her further erasure by not including her story.
The Wolfpack raises some broad questions about family and paternal authority, imagination, freedom, urban environments, living vicariously through film, and the ethics of documentary making. Moselle does not exploit the family, on the whole treating them with integrity and letting them narrate themselves, which they do with much insight. Now you can find the Angulo brothers on Instagram and in Vice videos on their trip to Hollywood. They even have their own company, Wolfpack Productions – continuing to live their lives through film it seems, albeit in a very different way. The documentary does a good job of acknowledging the darkness of their situation, as well as the creativity, charm, and spirit of the boys. It is also a metaphor for human experience: how we all, to an extent, create our own realities, contingent on the resources we have and the narratives available to us. A must see.
The Wolfpack is out in Cineworld, Parnell Street on Friday 28 August.
