Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller anchor a Queens family tragedy that plays like a thriller.
Paper Tiger is James Gray‘s best film. I did not expect to write that sentence about the man who made The Immigrant and Two Lovers, but here we are. The New York Film Festival opened its 64th edition with it, and I cannot think of a better choice. This is a New York movie down to its fingernails, a family drama that slowly turns into a crime thriller and then, almost without warning, into a tragedy.
It is also the third time Gray has gone back to his own childhood for material, and the most daring. Armageddon Time was a gentle, rueful memory piece about a boy learning how the world sorts people. Paper Tiger returns to the same Queens household in 1986 and asks a harder question. What happens when the adults you worship turn out to be as lost as you are?
The adults here are three. Miles Teller plays Irwin, an engineer and a decent man with no instinct at all for danger. Scarlett Johansson plays his wife, Hester, the sharp-tongued center of the house. And Adam Driver plays Irwin’s younger brother, Gary, a former cop with a flashy car, good suits and a gun in an ankle holster. To Irwin’s two boys, played with lovely unforced naturalism by Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel, Uncle Gary is the coolest man alive. When he walks in the front door with a catered Peter Luger dinner, the house lights up.
Anyone who has had an uncle like Gary knows where this is going. He has a deal. It involves the Gowanus Canal, still one of the most polluted waterways in the country in 1986, and a cleanup operation fronted by the Russian mob, whose bosses would prefer the city’s regulations not apply to them. Gary needs Irwin’s engineering credentials to make the paperwork look clean. He is sure he can handle the men on the other side of the table. Irwin, who has never met a gangster in his life, takes him at his word.
What a performance Driver gives. Gary is charming, generous and completely full of it, and Driver never lets us settle on whether he is lying to his brother or to himself. He has the salesman’s trick of making every risk sound like a formality. He also has a real love for his family, which is what makes him so dangerous. This is his best screen work since Marriage Story, and possibly better. There is a moment late in the film when Gary finally understands what he has done, and Driver plays it without a word. I have not stopped thinking about his face.
Teller surprised me even more. He has made a career out of cocky young men, from Whiplash to Top Gun: Maverick, and here he plays the opposite: a gentle, cautious, slightly nerdy father who admires his brother too much to say no. Irwin’s big failing is curiosity. He asks one question too many at the canal, and the Russians decide they do not like him. Teller plays the fallout as a man slowly drowning in shame, and it is the most mature, quietly devastating work he has done.
Then there is Johansson, who has never been better. Hester has a Queens accent you could strike a match on, and a tongue to match, but Johansson plays her as a woman holding a lot of fear behind the jokes. She is also keeping a secret of her own, a series of headaches and memory lapses she refuses to discuss with anyone.
When she finally learns what Irwin has pulled her children into, her fury and terror arrive at the same instant. It is a staggering scene. Anyone who knows Gray’s own family history will see one of the film’s blows coming. It lands anyway, and it lands hard.
The film’s most frightening sequence is its simplest. Irwin drives the boys to Brooklyn on a school night to show them the family’s big opportunity, leaves them in the car, and steps out to point out a safety problem.
What follows is the most frightening sequence I have seen in a movie this year. I will not describe it, except to say that one line of dialogue, delivered by a mobster reading an address off Irwin’s paperwork, is the most chilling thing in the film. Gray understands that the most terrifying thing a gangster can do is be polite.
From there the film tightens like a wire. Gary is sure he can fix things. The Russians, he tells his brother, are paper tigers. “Throw enough money at them and they’ll go away.” All posture, no teeth. The Russian boss, played with icy patience by Victor Ptak, disagrees, because you do not play games with the Russian mob, and Gray makes us feel the size of Gary’s mistake one scene at a time.
Every attempt the brothers make to get out digs them in deeper, and every scene at the family dinner table becomes a little harder to watch, because we know what the children do not. Gray has always been good at the tension between public faces and private panic. Here he makes it the engine of the whole movie.
Christopher Spelman’s score deserves its own paragraph. It is huge, brooding and operatic, full of low strings and the occasional mournful Russian choral piece. It hangs over the movie like the storm clouds that seem to follow these characters everywhere. A lesser director would drown a family drama in music this big. Gray earns every note of it.
The film looks superb, too. Joaquin Baca-Asay, who shot We Own the Night and Two Lovers for Gray, gives 1986 New York a grimy, lived-in texture without turning it into a noir costume party. The Queens kitchens feel real. The Gowanus looks like it smells. Editor Scott Morris keeps the running time under two hours, and yet the movie has the weight and sweep of an epic. There is a climactic sequence in a cornfield, of all places, that builds suspense so patiently that I realized afterward I had been holding my breath.
Watching it, I kept thinking of the great American crime movies of the 1970s, of Sidney Lumet and early Coppola, which cared more about families than about guns. But the closest cousin might be Gray’s own first film, Little Odessa, which he made in 1994 about Russian gangsters in Brighton Beach. More than 30 years later, he has returned to the same streets with a wiser, sadder eye. Paper Tiger feels like the movie he has been working toward his whole career.
It is fair to mention how close this version came to not existing. Gray first planned the film with Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong reprising the parents they played in Armageddon Time. When both dropped out, he rethought the whole project. Something bigger and more heightened emerged, closer to melodrama, but the good kind: the kind that is built on real emotion rather than manipulation.
The recasting turned out to be a gift. Johansson and Teller are not playing the same people. They are playing the same people under unbearable pressure.
Is it perfect? Not quite. But what film is.
There are one or two moments late in the film when Gray’s operatic instincts push right up against the edge of too much. But that is a small complaint about a movie this confident and this alive.
What stays with me most is how personal it feels without ever becoming precious. Gray is not settling scores with his family here. He is trying to understand them, to see his parents and his uncle as people who made terrible decisions for understandable reasons in a decade that told everyone that getting rich was the whole point. That is a big idea to hang on a crime thriller. Paper Tiger carries it.
Neon opens Paper Tiger in theaters November 13 before expanding November 20. See it on the biggest screen you can find.
RATING: ★★★★☆
That’s a Wrap | Paper Tiger
“A ferocious, heartbreaking New York family tragedy, and the best work its director and three stars have ever done.”
Jonathan P. Moustakas
Watch The Trailer Below:
CREDITS
Director: James Gray
Screenwriter: James Gray
Cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Miles Teller, Roman Engel, Gavin Goudey, Cindy Katz, Patrick Murney, Victor Ptak, Dimiter D. Marinov, Yavor Vesselinov
Cinematography: Joaquin Baca-Asay
Editor: Scott Morris
Music: Christopher Spelman
Production Design: Happy Massee
Production Companies: RT Features, Keep Your Head Productions, Leone Film Group
Distributor: Neon
Rating: Rated R
Runtime: 1 hour 55 minute
