The Wolfpack

By: Richard Schmidt

“Off the Wall, Out of the Middle” is a segment that focuses on a movie that has been recently released on home video, pairing it with a movie that was released at least five years earlier. Why five years? Because arbitrary rules give me a false sense of control.

OFF THE WALL: “THE WOLFPACK” (2015) 

When we first see one of the boys, he is looking out the window onto the Lower East Side. Inside the apartment, the group of brothers is recreating scenes from “Reservoir Dogs,” complete with costumes, hand-made props, and sound effects from a keyboard. They run up and down the narrow hallway simulating a chase scene, with one banging a spoon around the inside of a coffee cup to imitate the sound of the jewelry store alarm. We cut to one brother tied up in a chair, with another dancing around him, singing “Stuck In The Middle With You,” ready to play-act the most gruesome scene from the Tarantino film. This is their world, meticulously reenacting their favorite films, while the world outside remains a mystery.

The documentary, directed by Crystal Moselle, observes the life of the Angulo brothers, six boys cut off from the world by their overbearing father and enabling mother. They have lived their entire lives inside an apartment in New York City, allowed outside only several times a year under parental supervision, although one brother says, “One year, we never got out at all.” To cope, they dive into their vast film collection, painstakingly writing down every line by hand, creating impressive props with items found around the apartment, and taping their own versions of the films, with each brother taking on multiple roles. “If I didn't have movies,” one brother explains, “life would be pretty boring. And there wouldn't be any point to go on, you see? So movies opened up another world.” As the film progresses, we see the boys venture out into the world on their own, trading in the fictional world of cinema for the real world.

Along with the amateur film re-creations, we see the boys talking to the camera about their upbringing, revealing their feelings about their situations, as well as their feelings about their father. What unfolds is a glimpse into the psychology of a group of children completely isolated from the world, save from the movies that they voraciously consume.

“The Wolfpack” shies away from editorializing the experience of the boys, content to simply observe their day-to-day conditions. Moselle, apart from a few questions that we hear off-camera, keeps herself completely out of the documentary, and allows the boys to take center stage. It is refreshing that we don't see scenes that are clearly staged to increase the drama, although you do come away from the film with the feeling that you have only scratched the surface of this story. With such an interesting story, it would have been great to see the filmmaker confront the parents a little more about this imprisonment, but she seems content with letting the parents try to explain away their choices and moving on to the next scene. Should the filmmaker be criticized for her reluctance to dig deeper into this story? Would that approach have yielded a greater film? Or should that editorial remove be respected, since the subjects of her film have dealt with such trauma?

One could argue that Moselle's decision to hold back her directorial insistence on shaping the story is what allowed her to bring this story to the screen at all. I can imagine a scenario in which she is much more overbearing in her filmmaking, causing the boys to retreat into the shell of their former life. Too much pressure and the whole thing can fall apart in your hands. One could also argue that her remove from the process as the film was unfolding may have left many interesting aspects of the story untold. If you consider a film that Heckle and I discussed in one of our first recordings, “Stories We Tell”, you can see that a strong director shaping the trajectory of the story can yield some surprising and revealing truths that are under the surface of the subject's psyches. True, she was dealing with friends and family, giving her a gauge of their tolerance for increasingly intensive questioning. But even Sarah Polley did not know the direction that the story was going when she started filming, and would not have arrived at the same revelations in the end of the film without her characteristic of being, as her father calls her, a “brutal director.”

So, I come down conflicted in watching and thinking about “The Wolfpack.” This story is so intriguing, especially for a movie-lover. I am glad that these boys were able to tell their story, and that we were able to get a glimpse into their unique experience. For every part of me that wants more insight into the characters and the situation, I realize that a pursuit of that may have yielded no film at all. I say watch the documentary as it is, enjoy it for what it is, and then maybe re-create a scene from your favorite movie in honor of it.

Here is the trailer for "The Wolfpack."

OUT OF THE MIDDLE: “BE KIND REWIND” (2008)

Jack Black and Mos Def accidentally erase a store full of VHS tapes that the latter is supposed to be looking after while the owner is out of town. Their solution? To film their own versions of these films and pass them off as “Sweded” versions of those films to their unsuspecting patrons. The premise of this film, as well as the lead actors involved, did not have me rushing out to see this in 2008. When I saw the commercials, I just kind of rolled my eyes at Black doing his usual schtick, and Mos Def muttering some objections at an almost inaudible volume. It wasn't until the film came out on DVD (no, not VHS) that I saw the piece of information that inspired me to see it: written and directed by Michel Gondry. This filmmaker, who had made one of my favorite movies of the entire decade (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), was behind this goofy movie?

What unfolds on the screen is a fun, zany, and unexpected tale about community, responsibility and the love of film. We see these two characters throw together a 20-minute version of “Ghostbusters,” complete with an incorrect version of the theme song by Jack Black. Instead of customers irate about the re-done versions, they acquire a cult following for their amateur attempts. Soon, lines are forming around the block with requests to re-do the neighborhood's favorite films. We see re-creations of films as varied as “Rush Hour 2”, “When We Were Kings”, and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” all while the community is becoming more and more involved in the filmmaking process. All of this comes to a head when lawyers from the movie studios arrive, looking to shut down the copyright infringement. They point to the piracy warning that appears at the beginning of the tape. Jack Black replies, “We erased that!”

Gondry is able to present a film that is silly and fun, but has a heart to it that is missing from many comedies. He uses the simple story to get at deeper themes about the importance of film in our collective consciousness and the ability of shared stories to unite disparate groups of people. It also ponders the ownership of these stories, once they are disseminated into the cultural zeitgeist. There is a nice parallel worked into the film, as our two main characters, along with the owner of the video store, Danny Glover, set out to make a documentary of local jazz legend, Fats Waller. Mos Def leans that many of the stories told to him by Glover are a fabrication, or at least an exaggeration, of the music man's life. But the neighborhood embraces the impact of these apocryphal anecdotes, and works all of the them into the final cut of the homemade movie.

It is unfortunate that since its release, “Be Kind Rewind” has gone largely unseen, or forgotten, by many people. It is an entertaining love-letter to the movies and a unique portrayal of the fun and folly of making your own film. And it has the most entertaining montage I have seen in years, with a one-shot of the characters running between makeshift sets of the movies that are being “Sweded.” It may not be as substantial as many of Gondry's other films, but it is always fun to visit the worlds that his mind creates.

Here is the trailer for "Be Kind Rewind."