Paper Tiger Review: James Gray’s Queens Crime Drama Opens Nov. 13
Paper Tiger, James Gray's 1986 Queens crime drama starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson, opens in theaters November 13. A first review calls it one of the director's strongest films in years, a slow-burn story of two brothers and a mob front.
Paper Tiger, director James Gray's new crime drama set in Queens, New York, in 1986, opens in theaters November 13. A first review of the film calls it one of Gray's strongest in years. Here is what the movie is about, who is in it and how it looks.
Two brothers and a bad deal
It is a slow-burn story. Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller), an engineer and family man, is approached by his older brother Gary (Adam Driver), a swaggering former cop. Gary has a business proposition.
Using his ties to City Hall, Gary wants to launch a consulting firm for recently arrived Russian immigrants who have started a clean-up firm for the polluted Gowanus Canal. Gary would connect the Russians with his contacts. Irwin would advise them on keeping the operation up to code.
Both brothers have reasons to want the money. Gary is being bled dry in a divorce, and Irwin is weighing the cost of his eldest son's looming college tuition.
The Russians turn out to be a mob front. When Irwin sees something he should not have witnessed, he, his wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) and their two teenage boys become targets.
Performances
The review singles out Teller, who drops the bravado of his earlier roles to play a weak man trying to find his nerve far out of his depth. The critic compares Irwin to Dustin Hoffman's characters in Straw Dogs and Marathon Man.
Driver plays Gary as a man who, like the title's paper tiger, may not be all he claims. The review says Gary only shows his real vulnerabilities when alone and clearly loves his brother, even though he is ultimately responsible for the danger the family faces. It likens Driver's performance to the work of Gene Hackman or Robert Duvall in their prime.
Johansson plays Hester, a New York housewife with big curly hair who runs a tight household and is keeping a big secret from her husband and sons. The review calls her reaction to shocking news in one scene "utterly authentic and heartbreaking."
Return to familiar ground
Paper Tiger returns Gray to the milieu of his first three movies: Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night. The Pearls are a painfully ordinary, working-class family. The most dangerous thing they have seen is the revolver Gary keeps holstered to his ankle.
The film opens with a quote from Aeschylus: "Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further." The review reads Gary as the serpent who enters the family's modest paradise and tempts Irwin to want more.
One home-invasion sequence is singled out as incredibly creepy, because what the audience hears unnerves more than what it sees.
Cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay shot the film on 35mm. The grain and imperfections make it look as though it were made in the 1970s or '80s. Production designer Happy Massee and costume designer Amy Roth also worked on the period look.
