The family that stays together: Hanging out with The Wolfpack

Filmmaker Crystal Moselle's new documentary The Wolfpack opened this week.

The story of the Angulo family is undeniably strange. A couple and their seven children reside in a New York City apartment. The father, a devout Hare Krishna convinced the world is a dangerous place, keeps his family mostly locked inside but for doctors’ appointments and the rare recreational venture. He has the only key. The children are homeschooled, and contact with outsiders is virtually non-existent.

To connect with life beyond the apartment walls, the brothers – there is also a younger sister with a developmental disability – develop a ravenous appetite for films and take to recreating their favorites. As they mature, they rebel against their father’s rule and slowly break down his authoritarian regime. First, one brother breaks out, then the rest. As the cracks widen in the dictatorial façade behind which they had lived, the twin fears of their father and the outside world dissipate until they are mostly free, experiencing real life almost for the first time.

“Fear’s not a factor anymore – in our story,” said Govinda Angulo, the second oldest, with his twin brother Narayana, of the siblings. “I think we had a little bit of fear because we didn’t really know what to expect when we broke out. I think we’ve done really well under the circumstances. I don’t think there’s any fear there.”

Govinda and Narayana were joined onstage Thursday at the Lincoln Center in New York City by brothers Bhagavan, Makunda, and Jagadisa, as well as by their mother Susanne and director Crystal Moselle. They were in attendance for a question-and-answer session following a screening of The Wolfpack, Moselle’s new documentary about the family. The film was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival this year and began rolling out into theaters this week.

Moselle seems to have been given unrestricted access to the Angulos to document their story, no doubt due to the fact she met the brothers after they had already begun to dismantle their father’s makeshift prison. One of the brothers even states during an interview in the film that had they met a year before they did, no one would have spoken to Moselle. However fortuitous, the director’s good timing was aided by an eye for an interesting story.

“They were walking through the crowd, and something about them intrigued me,” she said. “They had this long hair and sunglasses, and they’re all in black, and I just ran after them. … It was very organic. When I met them, they were excited that I was a filmmaker, and they wanted to get into the business of filmmaking. We started hanging out at the park and looking at cameras together. … I filmed them at the park, and they asked me to come over to their house. I just always had a camera in hand. … It was all about creativity.”

As the Q-and-A went on, the collaborative nature of the project and the relationship between Moselle and the family came into sharper focus. On some level, they are almost partners as Moselle helped the brothers produce their first short film, saying she acted as a “sound board for them to take their art to the next level.” Susanne is even more direct when discussing Moselle’s place in the family.

“Crystal was just like a friend who would come and just be there with us and hang out and have fun with everyone,” she said. “When I met Crystal, it felt very natural to just let her in and open up our home to her and our hearts to her because she’s quite an incredible woman. I have to hand it to her. It didn’t really feel like we were being filmed and like: ‘Okay, now we have to present ourselves in some kind of way to be on camera.’ It was very, very natural.”

On one level, this is what the best documentarians do – make their subjects feel comfortable to such an extent that they behave as though the cameras are not even there, though they are always rolling. However, Moselle uses this privilege mostly just to pal around with her subjects as they perform their film re-enactments. There is little deeper investigation into the nature of the family or its unusual circumstances.

This is Moselle’s first film as a director, and she has found one helluva story to tell, but throughout The Wolfpack, it seems she is concerned with the less interesting parts of that story. Rather than explore the full implications of the family’s imprisonment, Moselle gives us brief hints as to what the family may have felt and experienced, but because so much emphasis is placed on the brothers’ filmmaking, it is impossible to become fully immersed in the other parts of their story.

The filmmaker and her subjects screen the film at the Lincoln Center.

Certainly, the tale of a group of brothers who grew up watching films and re-enacting their favorites attempting to become filmmakers is intriguing and worthy of a film in its own right. However, the Angulo family story runs deeper than that, and it is hard not to be frustrated by the film’s constant refusal to dig. What is more, it is hard to understand from where such reluctance would derive. Moselle’s rapport with her subjects would seem to suggest she could have probed further had she so desired. She simply does not.

“Crystal filming us felt more like a hangout more than work,” said Makunda. “It was like playtime because it was the whole circle of the filmmaking world. Re-enactments [were] part of our world, and we recognized filmmakers filming their subjects. I think we saw it as a complete circle of filmmaking. It was all like a hangout, really.”

The motif of the experience being a “hangout” recurred throughout the Q-and-A.

Govinda went on to say: “We’re sort of a film team, ourselves with Crystal and the team that made this movie.”

That the brothers became collaborators in telling the story of their lives is an empowering narrative in some sense, but it does not necessarily make for the best film. Perhaps, then, Moselle should have had more collaboration with Susanne, whose comments closed out the evening and who seemed to get closer to exploring the core of the Angulos than any of the filmmakers on stage.

“Family-wise, I see us growing and changing and evolving as a group of people who really love each other and care about each other and stick together and help to support each other,” she said. “I’ve always felt that in their support for me and my support for them. I also feel like it’s a real time of empowerment for me personally and also for them. It’s really a wonderful thing that’s happening.”

In a scene near the end of the film, we watch as Susanne calls her mother on the phone. The two women have not spoken in decades. Susanne’s unabashed joy and astonishment at the interaction make for some of the most beautiful moments in The Wolfpack. This is the life they missed out on due to their circumstances, and the scene is representative of the film the audience missed out on. If Susanne’s unfiltered, unself-conscious emotion is any indication, it would have been something.

New movie review: Dior and I

Raf Simons struggles to design the new Dior haute couture line in the new documentary Dior and I.

Except for some winter clothes in a duffel bag, these are the contents of my closet: eight polo shirts in three different colors; one pair of black slacks; one pair of dark blue jeans; and three black jackets. Just about anyone who knows me will corroborate this. The concept is to minimize the process, and the idea that I might put any thought or effort into what I am wearing is laughable.

All this is to say I am not the target audience for the new fashion industry insider documentary Dior and I. Nevertheless, I was enthralled by the tale of the newest head designer at Christian Dior and his attempts to maintain his own style and integrity while embracing the venerable Dior brand. Director Frédéric Tcheng, in his first solo effort behind the camera, keeps things light and breezy without ever losing sight of what is at stake for all involved.

Tcheng cut his teeth as a producer and editor, among other jobs, on the 2008 fashion doc Valentino: The Last Emperor, about the life and career of legendary designer Valentino Garavani. The career of his subject this time around is on more perilous ground. Raf Simons is well regarded – you do not get to design the new Dior haute couture line without reaching the pinnacle – but he is known for minimalist designs, men’s clothing, and ready-to-wear fashions. We are told repeatedly Dior is different, that haute couture is different, and the pressure weighs on Simons throughout the film.

There is a concept in screenwriting known as the ticking clock – “We have to evacuate the town because the dam will burst in an hour” – and it is used to create tension in a plot. It can occasionally come off as clichéd or arbitrary, but Tcheng weaves the ticking clock into his narrative so deftly that the audience feels the same pressures and anxieties as the designers in the film.

The Dior team works on the new line.

We are told at one point a new clothing line such as the one depicted would normally take about four to six months to bring to life. Simons and his team have eight weeks. On top of the time constraints, Simons has been given the reins to one of the premier names in fashion, a job that offers immense creative freedom but requires deference to the history of the brand. Simons is the latest in a long line of designers borne of the Dior philosophy. As much as any creative person wants to feel like an individual, at Dior, the trail must always lead back to the originator.

To drive this point home, Tcheng uses archival footage and voiceover passages from Dior’s memoir to establish just what the originator meant to the industry. These sections of the film are less a biographical look at Dior or a history of the company he founded than they are a series of mood pieces designed to put us in the mind of not only Dior but of anyone seeking to follow in his footsteps.

About two-thirds of the way through the film, Simons visits Dior’s old home and tells those he is with of his attempt to read Dior’s memoir – the same one Tcheng uses in the film. He says he had to stop 15 pages in because it was so weird and so intense that he could read no more. He was crushing himself with the memory of the man – even the clothes-makers in the Dior house speak of his ghost roaming the halls and checking their work. In a brilliant bit of narrative construction, after this realization, we get no more flashbacks to Dior or the past. The future and the new line are all that matter to Simons.

If only the rest of his team could be so singularly focused, Simons might have an easier time, but such things can never be easy. The other intriguing element constantly lurking in the background of Tcheng’s film is the intersection between art and commerce. Fashion design is undoubtedly art, but it is an art achieved to decidedly commercial ends. At a high-end house such as Dior, it becomes clear both the art and commerce are taken seriously.

The new line debuts.

Simons becomes bitterly aware of this when he expects to see an early preview of the new line, but the preview is delayed because one of his right-hand women is sent to New York for a private fitting with a wealthy client. He argues this is unacceptable but is told he must accept it. To watch Simons fight for the value of the new line is to watch an artist fight for the integrity of his art. Throughout history, artists have been required to compromise to appease the moneymen and influencers. Even at the top of the mountain, this reality holds true, maybe more so because more is on the line.

The wonderful thing about Dior and I is that it allows us to connect with its subjects on this level. You and I may not understand the first thing about haute couture, but art is intuitive. It is about the beauty and the struggle of creation. Tcheng’s film works not because it brings us into the world of fashion but because it brings us into the world of an artist who refuses to give up the fight.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Director Alex Gibney's new documentary Going Clear seeks to expose the lies behind Scientology.

“There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin.” – Linus in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

I promise not to discuss the Great Pumpkin in this space.

Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney is a masterful storyteller and a remarkable investigator who often spins riveting tales about true-life atrocities. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is firmly in the mold of his previous films such as the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It is a frightening and infuriating film, one from which you will not be able to turn away.

I am a great admirer of Gibney’s craft, and as a journalist, his research is impeccable. Going Clear had its worldwide debut less than 72 hours ago on HBO – though its premier was at the Sundance Film Festival in January – and the Church of Scientology has already tried to steal the headlines with its refutation of the facts presented in the film. The organization has started numerous websites and created countless satellite Twitter accounts all to mitigate the damage it believes this film will do to it. For a group that already has severe public relations problems, it is hard to blame the Church of Scientology for this reaction.

The film centers on two questions, one a matter of fact and the other a matter of interpretation. First, did the Church of Scientology use mental and physical abuse to control and contain its members? It will say it did not, though no current leaders or members of the Church of Scientology agreed to be interviewed for the film. The former members, including Oscar-winning writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash) and actor Jason Beghe (Chicago P.D. and X-Men: First Class), say mental and physical abuse was not only routine but a matter of policy.

It comes down to agenda. The Church of Scientology will do anything in its immense power to protect its business, while the filmmakers and interview subjects want to expose the organization as a massive, dangerous fraud. As the people whom Gibney interviews, including several former high-ranking members of the group, do not stand to benefit from knowingly making themselves the targets of a public smear campaign, I am inclined to believe their version of events.

So, if we accept as fact that the Church of Scientology engaged in a top-down program of systematic abuse, what do we do with that information? Similar charges and worse have been brought against the Catholic Church, and the results have been more or less the same. The accused organization denies any wrongdoing, suggests its accusers are lying or unreliable, and pays out an undisclosed settlement to bury its problems in money.

Ah, yes, the money. This brings us to the second question: Is the Church of Scientology a religion, and if so, does it deserve tax-exempt status from the government? For now, the IRS recognizes the Church of Scientology – which is worth billions of dollars – as a religion, and it does not owe taxes to the federal government.

Leaving aside how the organization achieved this status, which Gibney dissects at length in the film, the larger issue is whether something like the Church of Scientology constitutes a religion. One of the interview subjects says that part of the problem is putting that decision in the hands of the IRS. He says they are accountants and lawyers, not theologians, which is true to an extent, but when it comes to discussing far-out beliefs and perceived cults, don’t we all become amateur theologians?

Much is made publicly and in the film of the Church of Scientology’s beliefs, which include distant planets, ancient souls, and space aliens. If it sounds like an organization started by a science-fiction writer, that is because founder L. Ron Hubbard was in fact a science-fiction writer. However, I refuse to participate in a discussion in which these facts are used as the basis for dismissing the possibility of Scientology as a religion.

The Church of Scientology may be the new kid on the block, but I fail to see its beliefs in past lives and space pods as more ludicrous than a burning bush, reincarnation, or the parting of the Red Sea. It is too easy, particularly in a Christian-Protestant-centric nation such as the U.S., to look down on belief systems we find strange or out of touch. It is much safer to hold others up for scrutiny than to engage in serious, meaningful self-reflection.

Are the Church of Scientology’s abuses horrid? Yes, unforgivably so, but they are on par with the Catholic Church’s history of sexual abuse and basically every major religion’s shameful treatment of women. Does the organization deserve tax-exempt status? Absolutely not, and neither does any religion in a nation that values the separation of church and state.

Going Clear works as a stunning exposé of a corrupt organization run by an out-of-control power structure. The unfortunate circumstance is the people most in need of this information will never see it – those inside Scientology. For those of us outside the organization, there is nothing in the film not available to those curious enough to seek it out. Gibney’s film may shock you in its compilation of the details, but that is not its primary value. At its best, Going Clear will engage you with questions about the nature of belief systems and what happens when you realize your system is a fraud.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Life Itself

At 22, I landed my first professional newspaper job. Just six weeks out of college, I was hired to write sports and community news for a mid-size daily newspaper in a secluded Northern California county. It was a dream job, the vocation for which I had studied, for which I had strived, and toward which I had been pointed more or less my entire life. I was going to be a professional writer.

Still, classrooms, books, and teachers can only prepare you so much and cannot prepare you for what it is like to put yourself out in the public sphere, to be vulnerable, and to open yourself to the world. That is when the phone calls and emails started – vitriol directed at me because at whom else would it be directed. I was the man at the desk.

My editor, who had taken a chance in hiring me and to whom I remain grateful to this day, assured me it was nothing I had done. He urged me not to take it personally and to remember this is just the way it is. He had been the man on the Sports desk for 10 years before I got there, so he knew a thing or two about being the target of unchanneled rage.

But he had nearly two decades in the business on me. I was still green and less capable of accepting this as part of the job. It must have been me and something I had done. I had only been there three months, and already, I was wondering if I was in the right profession. Had I made a terrible mistake?

It was around this time, May 2011, that Roger Ebert wrote about Thor. Ebert would, on numerous occasions since he dove head first into the Internet, write something that stuck in people’s craw. He wrote about everything – gun violence, religion, evolution, etc., all topics bound to generate intelligent debate and childish name-calling in equal measure.

What Ebert wrote about best, however, were movies, and on this occasion, his review of Thor had so riled the fanboys he felt the need to write a blog post in response. On May 15, 2011, he posted “My mighty hammering over ‘Thor.’” With his usual sharp wit and deadly logic, he addressed his critics head on while still providing a forum for their criticisms – the comments section. Ebert was famous on his blog for personally vetting each comment, publishing it to the site, and responding when he felt it was warranted.

This confluence of events – the criticisms lobbed at him over Thor and my new-found since of dread every time the phone at my desk rang – led me to post a comment. I am not, by nature, a commenter. I read. I consider. I prefer discussion. But in this instance, I felt a need to comment. If you scroll down at that link I provided, you can see my comment. It is essentially what I have explained above, but it was also a thank you to Ebert.

I wanted to thank him for continuing to put himself out there, and I wanted to say to him, from one journalist at the beginning of his career to another approaching what would prove to be the tail end of his, I appreciated his work and the platform for discussion he provided. Ebert published the comment with this addendum:

“Ebert: If they always like you, you’re doing something wrong.”

He had responded to me. Nine words, and I felt as though I had won the lottery. Such was the impact of Ebert, and that power is what lies at the heart of Steve James’ wonderful new documentary, Life Itself.

Based in large part on Ebert’s 2012 memoir of the same name, the film tells the story of an old-school newspaperman who became one of the most influential voices the medium had ever known. A Pulitzer Prize winner who proved serious film criticism is also serious journalism, he used all the media at his disposal to bring real, thought-provoking discussion into as many homes as he could, starting with newspapers, through his television show with Gene Siskel, and eventually on the Internet.

James is the director of such Ebert-championed documentaries as The Interrupters and the masterpiece Hoop Dreams, and as his filmography suggests, he has a knack for taking broad, all-encompassing topics and breaking them down in a digestible fashion without pandering or selling his subjects short.

Here, he has the unenviable task of doing the same with the whole of one man’s fascinating life. James handles the assignment with aplomb, structuring the film around the four phases of Ebert’s private and professional life – his early career at the Daily Illini and the Chicago Sun-Times, his and Siskel’s television show, his life with wife Chaz Ebert, and his death.

Each section is revealing of a different aspect of who Ebert was. He was a brilliant storyteller who was often the life of the party. He was a prideful and ornery co-worker who butted heads with his equally strident and intelligent co-host. He was a generous family man who discovered later in life that love truly could be a guiding force. And he was a cancer survivor and eventually victim who took his disease and turned it into what he called “the third act” of his life.

The film paints stunning portraits of each of these men and shows how they were all derived from the same complex, flawed, and brilliant individual.

There are interviews with his fellow journalists, his old bar chums, and the filmmakers he critiqued and sometimes befriended. These are fascinating documents and will appeal to anyone passionate about film, journalism, or the journeys we all take in life. But the real hero of this piece is Chaz Ebert.

She comes across as a strong-willed, patient, caring, beautiful, and smart woman who knows one thing above all else: She loves this man. And he loved her. Ebert wrote at length about the joy his wife brought him, that without her, the loneliness and darkness would have consumed him. When Chaz Ebert speaks, you see in full the woman who could have that effect.

Most of all, it is seen in the couple’s interactions as the disease chips away at who Ebert was – a man of voracious appetites who could no longer eat or drink; a gifted storyteller who could no longer speak; a grandfather whose walks with his grandchildren brought immense pleasure into a once-empty life who could no longer ascend the stairs of his home. She is by his side every moment. She is the lighthouse guiding him safely into harbor and into whatever lies ahead.

Their great fortune and ours is that his mind remained sharp and his passion for writing endured until his final hours. In his last years, after the cancer had come and gone and come again, he produced more than many of us will in our entire lives. His life was a joyous one, and the sadness is ours that he will produce no more, that we live in a world in which Roger Ebert has written his last words.

See it? Yes.