‘Paper Tiger’ Cannes Review: James Gray Delivers a Modern American Classic
When an honest engineer accidentally witnesses a mob operation, his brother’s connections prove no match for the chaos that follows. Starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. In Competition.
Comedy, crime thriller, drama, tragedy. James Gray’s new film confounds expectations at every turn, guiding the viewer with steady, assured hands through the registers it moves between. It begins as one thing — a kind of period suburban comedy not entirely unlike his recent Armageddon Time — but what seems at first to be a portrait of a working-class Jewish family in Queens gradually becomes something else, then something else again, before arriving at a brutal and devastating conclusion.
The New York filmmaker’s extraordinary new picture carries the scent of his early work — Little Odessa, and later We Own the Night. It’s set in Brooklyn and Queens in the 1980s, and it involves cops and the Russian mob, but it’s only a thriller by accident, by misfortune — the result of people with no street sense stumbling into work that demands an intimate knowledge of the night and its various tribes. Out of that single, seemingly minor predicament, Gray builds a wrenching chain of events that tears a working-class family apart.
Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) lives with his wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson, curly-haired and bespectacled) in a modest Queens house, raising two teenage boys, Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel). He’s an engineer with a middling job; the couple scrapes by in a neighborhood where, Irwin insists, everyone seems to be doing a little better than they are. So when his brother Gary (Adam Driver) comes over for dinner and lays out a business proposition, Irwin listens.
Gary is an ex-cop — well-connected, easy to like, devoted to his nephews — who wants to help the family get ahead. The scheme involves cleaning up the notoriously filthy Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and redeveloping the surrounding area. The Russians have a grip on the territory, but when the brothers go to meet one of the bosses, Gary makes it all look manageable.
The trouble starts soon after. One morning, Hester rear-ends someone and goes to get her eyes checked — she’s been seeing double. That same night, in a moment of spectacularly poor judgment, Irwin takes his sons to see the canal and the neighborhood where he’s about to work. He walks straight into the middle of what is clearly illegal activity, and since nobody knows him and nobody trusts him, the Russians beat him up, threaten his kids, and let him know they know where he lives. And from there, as they say, things escalate.
Paper Tiger centers on Gary’s frantic efforts to contain the damage — to sit down with the Russian bosses and explain that it was all a misunderstanding, that his brother didn’t see anything, that there’s nothing hiding behind his blunder. But the Russians want money, or they want something Gary won’t give them. Meanwhile, Irwin braces for the worst, and Hester’s health — more serious than it first appeared — keeps quietly worsening. In what feels like a matter of days, the Pearls watch their ordinary life tip over into nightmare.
Wielding the kind of classical narrative economy that comes from a lifetime spent studying cinema, Paper Tiger advances methodically and without hurry, but without the self-conscious air of a filmmaker working in quotation marks. Gray tells this crime drama with a sharp compositional eye — three scenes in particular are filmed with real mastery — a strong hand with actors, and above all a deep fluency in the mechanics of American dramatic conflict: the tradition that runs from the studio pictures of the 1930s and ’40s through the grittier reinventions of the ’70s, with Scorsese and Lumet at the fore.
The American Dream has been the subject of more films than anyone could count, but Paper Tiger comes at it from a specifically 1980s angle — the Reagan-era faith that hustle and enterprise could be a way out, a belief held as firmly by newly arrived Russians fleeing a country in ruins as by any born American. Caught in the middle is the dream of a loser in the most sympathetic sense — an honest man who reached for something beyond his grasp, and paid for it in ways he never could have imagined. What surrounds his fall is sacrifice, in the film’s fullest and most unsparing sense.
