Director Crystal Moselle first met the six subjects of The Wolfpack while walking down First Avenue in New York. Consciously self-styled in Reservoir Dogs suits and shades, the brothers immediately grabbed her attention. At that point she was completely unaware that the occasion of their meeting also marked the first time the boys had ever left their Delancey Street apartment together as a group. Their father - an overbearing alcoholic and fanatical follower of Hare Krishna – held the only key to their apartment and, fuelled by his deep-rooted and deluded mistrust of society and government, refused to let them leave. Some years they ventured out (under his strict supervision) two or three times, some years they didn’t leave at all.
Devoid of any social interaction, their lives were instead dominated with consuming films, which they regularly (and with remarkable accuracy) act out in full. The impact of their seemingly constant exposure to cinema is evident in everything they do. As well as dressing as the characters from Reservoir Dogs, their Godfather inspired Thanksgiving dinner involved the pin-stripe suited boys raising glasses of red wine and toasting ‘salut’ to one-another. Further evidence is found in their formless accents, which seem to closely resemble the genre of film most similar to the subject of discussion at hand. When venturing into a forest area for the first time, one boy exclaims: “This is just like 3D – I feel like I’m in the Fangorn Forest from Lord of the Rings!”
If their lives sound light-hearted and twee, they aren’t. Films weren’t a shared obsession of passion with the six boys, but rather a grim necessity. Trapped in their small New York apartment for their entire lives, they had no other avenue of entertainment, interaction and to some extent, education. Named after Hindu Gods, the six brothers (and a lesser seen sister with learning difficulties) Mukunda, Narayana, Govinda, Bhagavan, Krishna, Jagadesh and Vishnu were filmed by Moselle for a period of four and a half years. At one point, Narayana admits; “If I didn’t have movies, life would be pretty boring and they’d be no point going on.”
Whilst the subject matter is utterly compelling, the execution of the documentary itself doesn’t quite live up to the brothers’ story. Although it is admirably not sensationalist, it falls short in providing enough context for their lives before the filming started for an audience to engage with. So rather than a flowing, coherent arc, The Wolfpack feels a little bit like a series of interesting vignettes. The initial fascination with the boys and their obsession with films carries you so far into the film, but it isn’t followed up with an exploration of why or how. At some points it feels like a film trapped between a visual essay and a subject-driven documentary, without ever quite achieving either.
With rumours that the boys have since started their own production company on the back of the success of this documentary, it will be interesting to see what they do next. While The Wolfpack is a very good documentary, it falls short of being great – a shame considering the incredible nature of the subject matter.
The Wolfpack will be showing at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 27 August 2015.
The Wolfpack Trailer
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