Stories about feral children or adults usually take place in remote areas where it's easier to avoid the organized world – like Sinofsky and Berlinger's non-fiction Brother's Keeper or Werner Herzog's The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. Crystal Moselle's astonishing first film, The Wolfpack, takes place in New York on the lower east side.
Here, the seven Angulo children – who range from the mid-teens into their early twenties – look out the window, have musical instruments, and watch movies constantly. They've been raised in a public housing high-rise, home-schooled and have had little direct contact with the outside world.
You might expect them to be full-out weirdos, which the Angulo boys are not. They have Hindu names because the parents like Hinduism, but the boys are not bizarre mutants. Their major frame of reference is movies. They're bright, pretty well socialized, polite and soft-spoken. They're articulate and they speak with better grammar than most Americans their ages.
Their father is Peruvian, their mother from the American Midwest. The parents met on the way to the famous ruins of Machu Picchu. They got married, had the children and it was probably the father who decided that the outside world was so compromised, the kids should stay inside.
The Wolfpack may be Crystal Moselle's first work as a director, but she has good instincts. She watches without judging. She asks questions from behind the camera, but there's not much by way of setup interview. She doesn't explain things, so viewers have to interpret from the images on screen, and get to feel how elusive the situation is.
Moselle doesn't impose an attitude, and the movie offers an open look at these unusual boys and their situation.
It appears that the filmmaking itself has opened up the family's life. The boys start going out on the town, and to the beach at Coney Island, where they actually go in the water. In a wrenching scene, the mother phones her mother for the first time in 50 years. She tells the grandmother that she has seven children and would love to have a visit, and when the call ends, there's real joy between her and her sons. Not the father.
You'd expect some darkness in this family, and again it would seem that the father has imprisoned them, by force of will more than physical violence – although there are hints that he's beaten his wife.
The film gives almost no sense of the one daughter, and the sons talk about the family in the impersonal language of people with something to hide – "things happened" – and the father talks the same way, going on about "things that happened" and "putting things behind you." He's a drinker. He talks about the importance of forgiveness. It's clear that he wants forgiveness for himself.
One of the boys shows obvious bitterness about his growing up, and a sense of sadness wafts through the film. Overall, these boys are sweet kids. They're eccentric, they have memorized and they do elaborate costumed recreations of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. They wear sunglasses much of the time and look like The Blues Brothers, or six Roy Orbisons. When the boys are outside, they clump together, yet toward the end of the film, one of the boys gets a job at a recording studio and makes normal conversation with other young people.
They're not freaks, and that's what's fascinating about The Wolfpack. How did these children grow up not to be freaks? The family has been investigated and cleared of any abuse or wrongdoing. A SWAT team broke in looking for weapons and found only the home-made toy guns used in their skits.
It's a good film about 'what the hell is normality anyway?'
