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Doesn't Pack Enough

Sometimes it seems like situations are created for the sole purpose of enabling a documentary to be created. Crystal Moselle's "The Wolfpack", which made its New York debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, is so bizarre that it could not be a work of fiction.

It was solely by chance that Moselle happened upon a group of young brothers in the streets of Manhattan. What they told her was something so unbelievable that she wanted to capture their story on film.

The Angulo family - made up of father, Oscar, his wife, Susanne, and their seven children - lived on the 16th floor of a public housing development. What made this no ordinary family was that the children almost never left their apartment at the orders of their wildly over-protective father. Even Susanne rarely ventured out and she had lost all contact with her other family members. Oscar went to work. Everyone else remained in the apartment.

So, how did the kids occupy their time? They became obsessive viewers of film, to the point where they would re-enact them, memorizing the dialog and dressing up like the characters. We get to view all of this through the home movies made by the kids and through the lens of Moselle.

Startlingly, the kids seem no worse off than if they had been raised under "normal" circumstances. They seem virtually unscathed. The biggest mystery in "The Wolfpack" is why Susanne has allowed her husband to confine her and her kids to an apartment for so many years. No sensible answers are provided. We also don't find out enough about the boys' newfound freedom or examine what they have gone through mentally. Maybe it's angling for a sequel?

"The Wolfpack" works as a superficial sociological examination of a truly odd family dynamic, but despite the wealth of weirdness available here, it is oddly slow, and even boring during a few sequences. Oscar is the alpha male of this wolf pack and he has done a poor job.  Moselle has done a far better job than Oscar (admittedly, not all that difficult to accomplish), but the results fall far short of the material available.