True Wolf

The topic's appeal is broad, but Whitehair's tight focus on one activist family keeps this film from being the one to reach an audience beyond those already involved in the issue.

It's hard to get close to a wild creature, and True Wolf doesn't always manage, either.

The documentary veers between repetitive and didactic pronouncements of a call to inaction and more affectionately told stories about Koani's life as an "ambassador wolf" on the elementary school circuit.

Having devoted much of their lives to combating lupine myths by introducing Koani to wonder-struck schoolchildren, Mr. Weide and Ms. Tucker are ill served by a director who reduces the anti-wolf lobby to caricature and the debates over reintroducing wolves to the Northern Rockies to grossly biased clips.

Spongy with equanimity and stronger on introspection than exposition, the movie amounts to a crude assembly of sincere testimony, somehow too long at 76 minutes and maybe actually a job for Werner Herzog instead.

Director Rob Whitehair doesn't do much to complicate what's essentially a promotional featurette for Wiede and Tucker's Wild Sentry organization, presenting the anti-wolf faction as rabid, irrational, and extreme. But he can't be blamed for wanting to stoke the drama a little: Without it, True Wolf would be a lesson in the care and feeding of an exotic pet.