The Wolfpack (2015)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on August 20, 2015 @ tonymacklin.net.

The Wolfpack is a skittish documentary.

It is one of those films in which what is left out is as important as what remains in. Maybe more important. The Wolfpack is a pack of cards with only face cards.

The Wolfpack is an inchoate film about a family of nine that lives in an apartment in the projects in lower East Side Manhattan, New York.

A significant fact is that the six male children were not "socialized," because their father Oscar had all the keys, and did not allow them out of the apartment, except on very rare occasions under his scrutiny.

Oscar, a Peruvian, met Susanne, a Midwesterner, on the Machu Piccu trail in Peru. They married and eventually moved to New York to make money to go to Scandinavia. Oscar had illusions of being a successful musician.

They had seven children - six of them boys whom they named after Krishna religious figures in "the oldest language on the planet - Sanskrit." The boys remained rigidly confined in their apartment, home-schooled by their mother, who was licensed to do so.

They had little or no encounters with those outside the apartment. The father set severe rules.

As one of the sons says, "He showed his rebellion by not working... My dad always thought he was better than anybody... He was the one who knew everything... We were frightened kids. He would slap her (their mother)."

In their hopeless environment, the six sons were drawn to movies. They had access to 5,000 movies. We don't know how the father or they got them. Just trust the filmmaker, it doesn't matter.

The boys mimicked what they saw on the screens in their apartment. But they are not as gifted as the film supposes.

They turned Pulp Fiction into Whelp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs into Reservoir Frogs, and The Dark Knight into The Snark Knight. Ed Wood had nothing to fear from the Argula clan.

Movies do matter, but so do perception and creativity.

The Wolfpack offers the image of a Batman costume made out of cereal boxes and yoga mats. Oatmeal anyone?

The six boys basically seem fairly interchangeable - some have toothsome smiles and flowing hair. All six are generally personable. But they are nonentities who have been imprisoned and like movies. In a scene when they finally go to the beach and go through a contest of coin flipping, they seem like a mediocre bunch.

There is a nice touch near the end, when one son eats an apple, and says, "Best damn apple I ever ate." The apartment hardly seemed Edenic, but the boys now are outside in a thinking world. Lotsa luck.

Filmmaker Crystal Moselle omits a lot of evidence. Several sequences seem truncated and manipulative. Some key elements are quashed, discarded, downplayed, or simply avoided.

Why did a SWAT team invade the family's apartment?

When Mukunda, the first to go alone out of the apartment, was stopped by police for wearing a mask, what was his experience of being put in a mental hospital? It's glossed over. What was the range and effect of the therapists on the entire family?

How influential was religion - especially Hare Krishna? Oscar refers to Jesus Christ as a model late in the film.

Where did the money come from? How much welfare? How hypocritical were they?

Why is the special needs daughter limited to straggling?

Why did Susanne phone her 88-year old mother in Michigan after 50 years? Was it because she was being filmed?

How much do the young men mirror their father, if at all? One says with disdain, "Over my dead body. They aren't going to make me go to a real school." Sounds like his dad.

Oscar is the villain of the film. The family is on record again and again as fearing him. But Moselle just pays lip service to this basic motivation. Not a single time in the film does the father intimidate anyone. His supposed fearsomeness is limited to an occasional glowering stare.

One wonders how much was left out.

The abiding theme is that movies and a mother's TLC - tender, loving capitulation - "saved" the boys.

What's next, The Wolfpack Meets The Kardashians?

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