Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Everybody has a right to have their story told, if not how do we learn to accept other points of view and then debate them with clarity and insightfulness. It is the rise of the documentary in the modern age that lifts a lid onto how others were raised so that we might glean how the adult turns out and how they have been influenced by their surroundings.
Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack is a case in point as it reveals the extent of being raised in an environment in New York City that is both unconventional to modern thinking but also heartbreaking in the reveal of possibilities that have been missed along the way for the six brothers and one sister of the Angulo Family.
The family were locked away into their own world to the point where the only social interaction they had was in the fictional world of recreating popular films for their own amusement and this is picked up superbly by Ms. Moselle as scenes from Batman, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are played out by the brothers, props, dialogue and tension all thrown in to the mix.
Not wanting to have his family corrupted by the American way of life, the drugs, the gangs, the prevailing winds that tear through the fabric of any society, the patriarch of the family may seem to be a man to whom his actions border on the realms of child abuse but his way of thinking may be, in his own mind at least, justified. It shows the extent of such disparate backgrounds finding a home in the most diverse city in the world and feeling fear and not being able to move away and wanting to protect his family the best way he could.
Human interaction is necessary, it allows growth and the chance to learn, yet somehow through the power of cinema, the brothers learned something very valuable, that imagination can never be jailed, can never be tamed and whilst the documentary feels at times as though it is shying away from the big questions it nevertheless captures the point that it is trying to make, that into every mind, freedom always yearns and must prevail.
A family that is decent has no reason to fear and fear should never be an option. The Wolfpack roams where it must.
Ian D. Hall