Crystal Moselle (2015)

In 2010 Crystal Moselle, walking in Manhattan, caught sight of a very distinctive group of six boys, most of them teenagers, all with waist-length hair; their number, clothes and black Ray-Bans brought to mind the protagonists of Reservoir Dogs.   An interview with Moselle in Variety in June this year describes what happened next:

‘Struck by their intriguing appearance, she chased them down the street, and introduced herself … Moselle and the brothers bonded over their love of cinema, and she soon learned about their cache of home movies, in which they re-enact their favorite films with sets, props and costumes made from whatever was lying around …

What she didn’t know when she initially decided to make a documentary about the sensitive and intelligent young men was their dark secret. “At first, I thought it would be this sweet little film about these kids making movies and figuring out how to get into the movie business,” Moselle says. That changed when she learned the brothers had lived virtually their entire lives locked inside a four-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side at the insistence of their paranoid father, who also kept their mother confined.’

The six Angulo brothers, whose ages now range from sixteen to twenty-three, are highly engaging, both as camera subjects and to listen to.  But as I watched The Wolfpack, I became more interested in how Crystal Moselle’s documentary had been made – in how the arrival of Moselle and a film crew in the Angulos’ home began to influence the lives that she presents.

The boys’ mother, Susanne, is from the American Midwest.  She met Oscar Angulo, a Peruvian, when he was a tour guide on the Machu Picchu trail in the late 1980s.  They fell in love and travelled together and in 1990 went to live in a Hare Krishna centre in West Virginia, where their first four children were born.  After some time on the road, with Oscar trying unsuccessfully to make it as a rock singer, they moved to New York.  Crystal Moselle interviews the parents, as well as their sons.   Oscar, who evidently has a strong alcohol dependency, explains that, after travelling abroad, he wanted to make a life in Scandinavia but it didn’t happen.   Susanne expresses regret that her children didn’t have the open-air Midwest upbringing that she enjoyed.  Both parents were alarmed by violence in the New York neighbourhoods in which they initially lived.  They moved to a housing project in the Lower East Side in 1996 and, for well over a decade after that, Oscar forbade Susanne and the children from leaving the apartment unaccompanied.  (It’s an unhappy irony that, according to others in the film, Oscar has a history of domestic violence.)  Family excursions into the world outside were rarely more than two or three a year.  The Angulos have seven children in all.  Their only daughter, Visnu, is the eldest and has cognitive disabilities.  Although she appears in The Wolfpack, she isn’t interviewed by Moselle:  overweight and torpid, Visnu is, beside her variously lively brothers, a saddening presence.  The boys too have names from Hindu scriptures – Bhagavan, the twins Govinda and Narayana, Makunda, Krisna and Jagadesh.

The primacy of movies in the brothers’ lives is an essential theme of The Wolfpack and perhaps it’s apt that the Angulos’ story, as Crystal Moselle tells it, includes devices familiar from screen fiction.  There is, for example, a Turning Point.  In January 2010, Mukunda, the most extravert of the brothers, decided to disobey his father.  Mukunda managed to get out of the apartment building and walked round Manhattan, wearing a homemade mask modelled on the one worn by Michael Myers in the Halloween films.  It seems that Mukunda wore the mask purely for purposes of disguise but he was picked up the police and subsequently spent a short time in a mental hospital.  His pioneering example encouraged Mukunda’s brothers to follow suit (although the film is sketchy as to how exactly they did so:  did they get their own keys or keep absconding?) and they were regularly going out by the time Crystal Moselle spotted them later in the same year.  Mukunda’s escape is presented in the film as the breaking of Oscar Angulo’s malignant spell.  The idea is emotionally appealing – it’s easy to see his long-haired sons, in their sixteenth-floor apartment, as urban male Rapunzels.  Yet the longer The Wolfpack went on, the more uneasy I was with Crystal Moselle’s narrative tactics.  She withholds information about the Angulos in order to emphasise both the extraordinariness of their situation and personalities, and the salvation-by-movies aspect of the story.

After Mukunda had been interviewed by police and doctors, the Angulo brothers were, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, ‘in therapy for a couple of years’ although ‘Child services and police spokesmen said privacy laws precluded them from confirming this …’  There is some discussion in The Wolfpack of Mukunda’s time in hospital but Crystal Moselle is silent as to whether the family’s bizarre way of life, once it had come to light, was investigated by social workers or officers of the law.  The brothers, although they’re still relatively socially inexperienced and their manner is eccentric, are notably bright and articulate.  One of them mentions his mother’s home-schooling licence and we gather that, since Oscar has long been a conscientious objector to working for a living, the teaching fees that Susanne receives from local government have been the family’s sole source of employment income.  There’s virtually no further reference to the home schooling, however.  It’s clearly inconceivable that the New York City authorities didn’t conduct periodic checks on its efficacy:  the NYC regulations online today include, as you’d expect, syllabus prescriptions and the details of monitoring arrangements.  But Moselle wants to encourage the perception of the Angulos’ education that has appeared in several reviews of The Wolfpack: the boys watched movies continuously and their creative potential was realised entirely through doing so and through re-enacting scenes from their favourite movies.

Moselle is determined too to characterise Susanne Angulo as a wife utterly dominated by a tyrant husband and as a mother who feels she’s let her children down because she was too fearful of Oscar to resist him.  Stressing almost exclusively this side of Susanne not only downplays the contribution she has probably made to her sons’ educational development; it also allows Moselle to give Susanne a convenient dramatic shape – increases the impact of her coming out of her shell later in the film.   It transpires that Susanne, influenced by Oscar, hasn’t been in touch with her own mother for decades (I seem to think fifty years was mentioned, even though that’s twice as long as Susanne and Oscar have been together).   When Susanne renews contact, in a telephone call to her mother, and emotionally tells her sons about this, the boys are excited but one of them reasonably asks, ‘So what happens next?’  By this stage of The Wolfpack, I was suspicious enough to think the honest answer would have been:  ‘I don’t know – let’s see what Crystal says’.

The brothers are likeable and their resilient vitality is remarkable.  The resemblance to the Reservoir Dogs brigade that first caught Crystal Moselle’s attention (and which is confirmed on the poster advertising The Wolfpack) is not the only Quentin Tarantino connection.  The Angulos’ theatrical inventiveness in sequestered circumstances reminds you that the video rental store he once worked in – and where, cooped up, he watched films day-in-day-out – is widely regarded as a seedbed of Tarantino’s own creativity.  There is also a less appealing resonance with Tarantino – an artist who seems to see everything through a movie prism (and, in his two most recent films, has blithely subjugated historical fact to a cinephiliac reimagining of history).  I’m uncomfortable with the glorification and simplification of cinema that informs Crystal Moselle’s approach (and that also informs, I think, some of the enthusiastic reviews that The Wolfpack has received).  According to this film, movies are inherently and simply a force for good and against evil – and culturally unique in this respect.  There’s no suggestion that literature or any other art form or aspect of the Angulos’ home education could have had the same life-enhancing and sanity-saving effect.  Nor is there any recognition that continuous exposure to film might have brought about difficulties as well as pleasure.  Moselle barely touches, for example, on the growth of the boys’ sexual curiosity – even though watching large numbers of movies must have increased their awareness of sex, and even though the situation in which their father had placed his sons was already conducive to terrible sexual frustration.  You can see what an incredible thrill it is for the movie-obsessed Angulos to be the subject of a movie; there are now articles online suggesting that the success of Crystal Moselle’s directing debut could help them realise their own film-making ambitions.  This doesn’t alter the evidence of The Wolfpack that the brothers were exploited in the making of it.

27 August 2015