Following ventures into the Amazon, a trek into deep space, and a detour into heartwarming family drama, James Gray returns to his bread and butter with Paper Tiger. Similar to his gritty early work such as Little Odessa and We Own the Night, Gray is back exploring the corrosive quest to achieve the American Dream, seen through a New York crime story involving the mob and sibling tension. Few are better at telling these kinds of stories than Gray, and Paper Tiger is another solid, tension-filled effort, but at the same time, it feels like he’s got little that’s new to add to it.
Miles Teller is Irwin Pearl, with Adam Driver as his brother, Gary. Irwin as a normal, blue collar guy in 1980s Queens, living a modest life as an engineer along with his wife, Hester, played by Scarlett Johansson, and their two sons. While Irwin is scraping by, driving a beat up old car and worrying about every penny, Gary is seemingly in a much better place. A former NYPD detective, Gary escaped the corruption and started his own security firm, which is doing pretty well. Gary has a flashy lifestyle, drives a fancy car, but a looming divorce threatens it all.
Gary has always looked after Irwin, and when a lucrative business opportunity comes up that could benefit them both, he wants to jump on it. It involves Russian immigrants, a job that would require the services of a skilled engineer to clean up a canal in Brooklyn, and somone who can grease the wheels to skirt past all of the city regulations. This deal could net them a lot of money, and Gary doesn’t mind that the Russian mob, newly arrived stateside, are likely behind it. Irwin, a regular guy who doesn’t swim in these waters, is pretty ignorant, and when he mistakenly takes his boys to examine the work site, he sees something he shouldn’t have seen and now the mob want payback. While Irwin’s family suddenly comes under threat, they’re doing it so as to sink their hooks into Gary, who they need because of his connections with power players and law enforcement.
Paper Tiger is about how the brothers navigate this rapidly escalating situation, each handling it in their own way. The term “paper tiger” describes a person who projects as tough, but is weak on the inside. Both Gary and Irwin attempt to project strength in different ways, depending on what they have to lose. Irwin tries to pretend that everything is okay, as if everything is handled because that’s what he thinks will best protect his family. He relies on Gary to take care of everything so as to keep the growing violence from coming into his home. Unfortunately, Gary is all too willing to get down in the mud with the Russian gangsters and to match violence with violence, which only makes things worse. While Gary is a popular guy around town and known as a former cop, he soon comes to find that some people don’t appreciate those who stay clean, because it makes the rest of them look bad.
A subplot involving Hester’s medical diagnosis is affecting only because of Johansson’s heartbreaking performance. Hester, also trying to project strength and not burden others, hides her condition while also taking active, and possibly detrimental, steps to get them out of trouble. But Johansson is pretty much all alone as her story is given short shrift and could’ve been dropped altogether without impacting anything.
All of the performances are great, though, and you can’t help but get invested in the entire Pearl family. Gray ratchets up the tension to an unbearable level, especially in a nearly-silent sequence where the mob infiltrates the house in the dead of night. We are constantly on edge wondering when the other shoe will drop, and who will get hurt most by it. Teller has the less showy role as Irwin, who is just trying to do right by his family but “lacks street smarts” as Gary explains.
Driver is such a perfect fit for Gray’s style of film, it reminds of when the filmmaker and Joaquin Phoenix were a constant pair. I think Driver is at his best playing characters who are just pure bravado and self-importance, with Gary fitting that to a tee. Gary struts around town, boasting about his law enforcement pals and relying on past experience to navigate his dealings with the mob. But arrogant people tend to be sloppy, and fail to realize when their experience no longer applies. Times change, and crime is always evolving. The Russian mob isn’t the same as the Italian mafia that Gary is familiar with.
Paper Tiger is a James Gray movie through and through, and while there’s much to like about it, there is little that we haven’t seen from him before.
NEON will release Paper Tiger in select theaters on November 13th, with a wider rollout a week later.
