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The Wolfpack
Aug. 28th, 2018 07:15 amCrystal Moselle’s got a new movie coming out, Skate Kitchen (which is about a girl who joins an all-girl skateboarding gang; it looks super cool), so I decided to see her earlier film, The Wolfpack. One of the benefits of watching films by female directors is that many of them have short filmographies; it’s easy to catch up.
(It's an aggravating benefit when you think about why it's like that, but still.)
The Wolfpack is a documentary. It’s about a family in New York City who followed their own peculiar individual interpretation of Hare Krishna which led them to strive to have ten children (they ended up with six boys and a girl, all with Indian names; the parents are not Indian), whom they homeschooled. The father was the only member of the family with a key to the front door. The children rarely left the apartment.
To entertain themselves and teach themselves about the outside world, the boys watched movies, and eventually started filming themselves reenacting their favorite movies. (The girl seems quite left out of things; I did wish that the documentary gave a little more information about her.) Eventually, they started to leave the apartment in a group, all dressed up like they’ve walked off the set of Goodfellas. This is how they met Moselle.
It’s an interesting documentary. I sometimes wanted it to dig a bit deeper, but on the other hand this is a sort of awkward criticism for a documentary: you can’t really demand that the people being documented dig deeper into their emotional pain and screwed-up family dynamics for your entertainment.
I think this is why I generally prefer fiction films to documentaries: they can go as deep as they like and you don’t have to worry what kind of effect they’ll have on the characters. Fictional characters may suffer all kinds of hell in the movie itself, but, since they’re fictional, the existence of the movie won’t hurt them.
(It's an aggravating benefit when you think about why it's like that, but still.)
The Wolfpack is a documentary. It’s about a family in New York City who followed their own peculiar individual interpretation of Hare Krishna which led them to strive to have ten children (they ended up with six boys and a girl, all with Indian names; the parents are not Indian), whom they homeschooled. The father was the only member of the family with a key to the front door. The children rarely left the apartment.
To entertain themselves and teach themselves about the outside world, the boys watched movies, and eventually started filming themselves reenacting their favorite movies. (The girl seems quite left out of things; I did wish that the documentary gave a little more information about her.) Eventually, they started to leave the apartment in a group, all dressed up like they’ve walked off the set of Goodfellas. This is how they met Moselle.
It’s an interesting documentary. I sometimes wanted it to dig a bit deeper, but on the other hand this is a sort of awkward criticism for a documentary: you can’t really demand that the people being documented dig deeper into their emotional pain and screwed-up family dynamics for your entertainment.
I think this is why I generally prefer fiction films to documentaries: they can go as deep as they like and you don’t have to worry what kind of effect they’ll have on the characters. Fictional characters may suffer all kinds of hell in the movie itself, but, since they’re fictional, the existence of the movie won’t hurt them.
