After seeking meditative melodrama in odysseys as deep as the Amazon and as far as the vast emptiness of the cosmos, New York wunderkind James Gray took the only logical next step for someone in his position, and went full-circle to dig into the most vulnerable depths any director can explore: his own formative years, laid out in the shattering and underpraised “Armageddon Time.” So after quite literally shooting for the stars and coming back around to where it all began, where could Gray possibly go next? How about where it *really* all began?
“Paper Tiger” is nothing if not a late-stage revisit of the New York-based crime dramas on which Gray cut his teeth ever since “Little Odessa” announced his talents for the frigid histrionics that breeds between two facing pistols and a family in the middle, but the advancement of his technique since those early days is wholly evident from the moment this film opens on a wheat field not at all dissimilar to that which closed out “We Own theNight.” As ever, all it takes to lead him into quiet tragedy is a pair of siblings with tender hearts, thick skulls and even thicker Brooklyn accents.
This time, Gray joins the growing pantheon of auteurs who have chosen as their primary vessels one Adam Driver, who plays the slick and successful former cop Gary Pearl. We’re actually introduced to the drama through Gary’s younger brother Irwin (Miles Teller), who leads a simple life as an engineer living in a suburban household with his wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) and their two teenage sons (Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel). In the blink of an eye, that quiet life is upended when Uncle Gary calls his brother out of the blue and invites himself over for dinner with a business proposal.
A well-connected and charismatic businessman thanks to his longstanding connections through the force, Gary has caught wind of development projects to clear out New York’s waterways of oil, and the rush of Russian immigrants who’ve set up shop in the area are more than suitable, to Gary anyway, to be their partners on a consulting basis. With Gary’s connections and Irwin’s technical knowhow, a tentative deal is struck… until one innocuous mistake on Irwin’s part plays to the Russian mob’s paranoia and sets forth a complete unravelling of not only his life, but that of his entire family.
This includes, naturally, Gary, but Gray wisely sidelines his biggest arthouse draw as more of an ancillary figure whose gusto and influence lingers large over every trepidatious move his younger brother makes after that initial fuck-up that he couldn’t feasibly have anticipated. Gary is always there—though at a distance—to assure his kin that he’ll find a solution when mobsters start extorting the family for $125,000 or breaking into their house as they sleep to rearrange the furniture, but the extent of these intimidation tactics are enough to set any reasonable person over the edge and assume that the former fuzz in a flashy suit is all talk.
The film’s title derives from a moment in which Gary, consoling a shaken Irwin, reassures him that these mobsters are all talk and quick to fold for a moderately appealing deal, but it’s not hard to see where Irwin and Hester, as the pressure mounts, start to perceive him as the paper tiger. That is, of course, until he isn’t, and Gray’s penchant for unabashedly blunt-force melodrama pushes his characters over the edge and shows just how willing and unwilling they are to step up when the time comes.
Insulated primarily to its trio of established names (though the two youths hold their ground sturdily enough), “Paper Tiger” rests almost entirely on the three-way rapport of doubt and sudden anxiety that ripples through their lives, and Gray’s no-holds-barred approach to twisting stiff demeanours until they snap in half proves utterly devastating when Teller fails to truly console his sons after a face-to-face intimidation session late at night; or when Driver looks subtly terrified as he fails to talk his way out with a clean deal; or when Johansson appears permanently distraught and unable to trust anyone in her life to help alleviate the burden that has been placed before her. (Hester meets a ruinous development of her own on the side that would read as excessively maudlin, if not for Gray’s fixed commitment to that theme of familial imperatives and the growing inability to believe that they can actually, as we always like to assure ourselves, be shouldered together.)
It’s precisely this unapologetically straightforward grasp of his characters and the lives they lead together that allows Gray to indulge in bouts of cutely rigid dialogue straight out of a ‘50s noir—bolstered further by the director’s pitch-perfect grasp of ratcheting tension through his use of his actors’ faces and shadows on the walls—as if the occasional nuggets of exposition or “one potato, two potato” lines exist not for the sake of lazily informing the audience, but thoroughly informing the style that might leave them cold. After so many years holding strong as one of the United States’s most underrated filmmakers, “Paper Tiger” is hardly primed to keep James Gray’s longtime detractors or the average unsuspecting viewer from folding at the first sign of trouble (or playfully hokey writing). But the Gray Zone in which the piercing dramatist operates—not flashy enough for hardcore auteurists, not quite palatable for an antsier public—is only more devastating because of its refusal to stop looking for the warmth of a brother’s hug in the isolating frost of a lonely Brooklyn night.
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