James Gray knows how to mess with genre. His last film, 2022’s “Armageddon Time,” was a coming-of-age memoir, but a notably unsentimental entry is what is usually a sentimental genre. And his new one, “Paper Tiger,” has all the trappings of a crime thriller, but it flips the equation from four years ago: It’s a very sentimental entry in a typically unsentimental genre.
Considering that both movies are based on elements of Gray’s own life, it’s safe to conclude that the Grays are not a normal family, if indeed such a thing exists.
Gray himself is a director who approaches his work with both rigor and humanity. So “Paper Tiger” is a taut exercise in suspense, with a couple of bravura sequences that stretch the tension to the breaking point as hubris and wishful thinking lead a family into dangers they didn’t know existed – but it’s also a warmhearted study of family members who can argue and be wildly at odds, but who almost always walk away from each other with the parting words, “I love you.”
It seems like more than a few action movie sequels have used the tag line “this time it’s personal,” but in this case this time it really is personal, and bolder in the way it turns elements of autobiography into what might otherwise be taken as one of those cases of pulse-pounding entertainment.
The film, which premiered on Saturday in Cannes’ Main Competition, is set in Queens in 1986, an era when the Mafia was moving out and the Russian mob was beginning to assert itself in the construction business. Irwin and Hester Pearl (Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson, appropriate accents in place) are raising two boys and facing the usual money troubles when Irwin’s brother, Gary (Adam Driver), approaches Irwin with a proposition: There’s a huge cleanup operation taking place on a polluted local canal, and Gary thinks he can persuade the Russians to hire himself to oversee the project and Irwin to be head engineer.
It’d be a big job, and a hugely lucrative one: $10K to Irwin just for the initial consult. “It could be just what you wanted,” says Hester, though she also has one demand: “Make sure he pays in cash so we don’t have to declare.”
Irwin’s definitely got the skill set and the obsessive nature to handle this kind of project, and Gary … well, Gary is all kinds of things. He’s a former cop who alienated some of the others on the force because he wouldn’t go on the take, and now he seems to have all kinds of connections in all kinds of different places. He invites himself to dinner at Irwin’s house and shows up with a catering crew from Peter Luger’s Steakhouse, and he wows the kids with his piano playing, his card tricks, his snappy line of patter – and, oh yeah, that gun in his ankle holster.
If Gary was known for being clean when he was on the force, his standards have definitely slipped in retirement. But he’s convinced that the Russians are paper tigers, all bluster and no follow-through, and convinced that he has the city hall connections that’ll make him invaluable to them.
And maybe it could have worked that way, if Irwin were a little less eager to strut his engineer stuff and show off for the kids. At dinner one night, he announces that he’s going to do a “night-time risk assessment” of the canal and he wants the boys to tag along with him, even though they’d rather stay behind and do their homework. (These are teenage boys we’re talking about, so the fact that they’re lobbying to do schoolwork suggests that dad can get a little too gung-ho at times.)
As it turns out, the only real night-time risk assessment Irwin should have made is that it’s a really big risk to go to the canal at night. Because if you do, you’re going to see a bunch of Russian gangsters doing illegal toxic dumping and other unsavory stuff. And if they see you seeing them doing that stuff, you are in big trouble.
Irwin is threatened, the kids are threatened at knifepoint and gunpoint, and things spiral downhill and out of control. Gary keeps saying he can work it out and he keeps failing to work it out, while threats from the Russians escalate to a whole new level once the big boss, Semion Bogoyavich (an icy Victor Ptak) gets involved.
“Anora” turned Brighton Beach Russian gangsters into comic relief not too long ago, but “Paper Tiger” gives them back their status as, as one former police colleague warns Gary, “tough motherf—ers.” And that steers the movie straight into tough motherf—ing territory.
Back shooting on film after making “Armageddon Day” on digital, Gray cranks up the suspense as the Russians apparently sneak into the Pearl house in the middle of the night and rearrange the furniture. (It’s scarier than it sounds.) There are deadlines, things get desperate for Irwin and Gary as the mobsters close in and the cops do the same, and Hester has an entirely different problem all her own.
To hear that this was inspired by actual events in Gray’s life, as was “Armageddon Day,” is truly unsettling – but it also explains why a movie that could easily become a gripping thriller manages to keep the focus on family ties. The actors are a big help on this front, with Driver slipping into Gary’s forced cockiness like it’s one of those tailored suits he wears and Johansson nailing the ’80s Queens housewife whose hairdo alone is a formidable and fearsome work of architecture. Teller, meanwhile, may not have had a role this satisfying since “Whiplash,” and he’s wildly effective as a guy whose best intentions and worst instincts seem to go hand-in-hand.
On the other hand, James Gray has pretty good intentions and pretty good instincts, which for the past 30-odd years have led him to tackle a number of different genres (crime with “Little Odessa,” romance with “Two Lovers,” period drama with “The Immigrant,” adventure epic with “The Lost City of Z,” sci-fi with “Ad Astra,” coming-of-age drama with “Armageddon Time” … ) while always putting a spin on the genre trappings. And now the spin is, as they say, personal.
“Paper Tiger” still a thriller, because the events that play out on screen wouldn’t allow it not to be. But rarely do you find a thriller with this much heart.
“Paper Tiger” will be distributed in the U.S. by Neon.