James Gray’s 2007 underworld drama We Own the Night closes on a whispered affirmation of solidarity between siblings. The brothers, who have survived a series of clashes with the Russian mob, pledge their devotion to each other, in a moment of profound connection and of desolation. At the end of a story defined by loss, they have each other’s backs and nothing else.
The enveloping bonds of brotherly love—and how swiftly they can tighten, in spite of themselves, into a straitjacket, or a noose—are the subject of Gray’s new thriller, Paper Tiger. The picture, which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, is suffused with an emotional heat that can’t quite thaw its icy bleakness. The balance of palpable warmth and scarifying chill makes it Gray’s most effective and affecting feature since We Own the Night, which it resembles both as a gritty period piece set in 1980s Queens and as an anxious, ambivalent meditation on masculinity. “Let there be wealth without tears,” reads an opening epigram, attributed to Aeschylus. The near impossibility of pursuing the former without the latter provides the catalyst for a carefully measured domestic tragedy.
“Everybody up here was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, or stole one. That’s not us,” notes a character early on in Paper Tiger, referring slyly to the pretensions of the Long Island suburbs. The line is delivered with just a hint of foreboding, in the midst of a family confab around a pool. It’s Labor Day weekend, and the assembled gaggle is enjoying one final summer idyll, before grown-ups and children alike have to get back to the grind—or, in the case of Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller), look for a way to leave it behind forever.
As Paper Tiger opens, Irwin is without tears, though he has plenty of troubles. The rapidly dilapidating suburban home he shares with his wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), and their sons, Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel), is in need of repairs. The family car and other assets are depreciating. College applications for Scott are due. And a sense of diminished and receding horizons is closing in on Irwin himself. Irwin is an engineer, which means he’s good at measuring things; that’s why he’s pondering his prospects while he’s still on the right side of middle age and painstakingly installing storm windows in the late-summer heat. His inch-by-inch empiricism contrasts with the maximalist, magic-realist manner of his older brother, Gary (Adam Driver), who appears to be flush with cash and shows up for Friday night dinner with dinner (a full-course spread from Peter Luger, delivered by truck in warming trays). Gary plays piano and does card tricks; he takes Hester in his arms at the door and dips her, suavely and sweetly, a matinee idol-in-law. Irwin carries a tape measure; his brother packs a pistol in an ankle holster, which he flashes to his nephews under the piano for a vicarious thrill; the implication is that this ex-cop is also a guardian angel.
The contrast here between the flamboyant, jumbo-size playboy and the mild-mannered mensch is obvious: Cain and Abel; goofus and gallant; the grasshopper and the ant. Gray doesn’t deal in cliché, however. Instead, he shows us, through the observation of small behavioral details, how both men have slipped into their respective personas, and conveys why they might now be trying to shed those skins. That Irwin quietly idolizes his brother makes sense: He’s been looking up to Gary (who’s long and lanky enough to start at forward for the Knicks) for his whole life. There’s no resentment or skepticism, just respect—a powerful lure against the common sense he swears by in all other facets of his life. Gary, meanwhile, values Irwin’s intelligence and stability, and also his desire to do right by his wife and kids, which becomes a prompt, however indirect, for self-loathing as Gary continues to pay through the nose for an ugly divorce.
His carefully veiled money troubles prompt him to embark on a project that’s rotten around the edges, and to rope in Irwin for his technical expertise. Gary will make the introductions and secure the contracts; Irwin will take measurements and file paperwork for a cadre of shady Russian businessmen descending on—and into—the sludgy abyss of the toxic Gowanus Canal.
“This could be the perfect opportunity for us to do something substantial together,” marvels Gary as they look over blueprints in Irwin’s basement. That we immediately sense impending disaster doesn’t undermine Gray’s storytelling tactics. Rather, it deepens them: His movies are pressurized by their own predictability. Gray’s background is Russian Ukrainian, but his artistic sensibility, you could say, is Greek—heavy on moral inquiry and self-fulfilling prophecies. His characters make their beds and lie in them, sleeplessly; nightmares unfold in broad daylight. The use of a famously polluted waterway as the setting for a fable awash in moral turpitude may not be subtle, but it is endlessly apt. The toxic canal in Paper Tiger has just as much to do with the helpless, flailing sensation of drowning as with the social and political implications of pollution. Plumbing the depths of his artistry, Gray immerses us in the breathless dread of being in over your head and unable to touch the bottom.
Murkiness is a motif in Paper Tiger: not just the wine-dark surfaces of the canal, which hold Irwin’s gaze and compel him to look deeper, with disastrous results, but also the blurry perspective of Hester, whose vision is seemingly on the fritz. Again, there’s a distinctly literary juxtaposition at work here—the husband who sees too much; the wife who’s losing her sight—and yet the angst is sustained and heightened by marvelously calibrated staging and performances. No less than Irwin or Gary, Hester is aware that she’s playing a role—a supporting one, cherished and thankless, and also maybe doomed. Dolled up humbly in button-down blouses and a bob that make her look like a gorgeous Far Side cartoon, Johansson takes a familiar strain of seriocomic Jewish-mother guilt and internalizes it; she shifts from loving, life-force bluster into a fugue state.
In the past, Teller’s acting has not exactly contained multitudes: If he’s excelled at anything, it’s been a callow, pummeling bluntness (ideal for a monomaniacal drummer in Whiplash; alienating pretty much everywhere else). Here, working with a filmmaker whose casting instincts are almost always sharp (one exception: Brad Pitt as an existentially addled astronaut in Ad Astra), he captures something more elusive and empathetic—the paralyzing shame of a father who clearly doesn’t know best. Irwin’s terrible, irreversible misjudgment is taking his boys on a superfluous nighttime visit to the jobsite, where they become first separated, and then terrorized, by thugs who dangle their weapons in front of the kids (a frightening rhyme with Gary’s playful act of show-and-tell). That mistake is compounded by the way he keeps it from Hester (who’s hiding bad news of her own). Instead of going to her—or the cops—with the news that their family is in the crosshairs, Irwin calls Gary, who seems to have the liquid assets to mollify the bad guys and the NYPD contacts to keep the Russians in check.
Except that he doesn’t: To Irwin’s prying eyes and Hester’s failing ones, we can add Gary’s unique and dangerous myopia. He’s street-smart enough to know that mob lord Semion (Victor Ptak) ultimately only cares about business, but he’s not wise enough to fully mind his own; instead, he’s blinded by fantasies of playing Uncle Dirty Harry. The most striking thing about We Own the Night, a legitimately complex movie about a big-city police force, was how it explored that world’s cloistered, modern-warrior mentality from the inside out—the thin blue line as a tightrope between institutional conditioning and individual agency. (Crucially, the disturbing last line of We Own the Night, “I love you, too,” is uttered by a character during his police academy graduation ceremony.) Gary is a crook who carries himself like a cop, but he’s stranded between worlds. It’s a testament to Gray’s conceptual finesse that the title of Paper Tiger could refer equally to Irwin, who knows he’s toothless, and Gary, who swaggers through his old precinct and along the muddy shores of the underworld with his fangs bared. Driver is amazing in a role that embraces narcissism so fully that it blossoms into something like a state of grace.
Gray’s skills as a dramatist are heightened by his ambitions as an image-maker: He’s always good for a suggestive composition or a startling set piece, and he tops himself with Paper Tiger’s centerpiece sequence, a home invasion awash in sinister symbolism. Terror becomes abstract, dreamlike; the shadow of a rifle, projected against the wall, lingers in the mind’s eye. As in We Own the Night, which featured the best car chase this side of The French Connection, Gray respects the rules and pleasures of genre cinema without deferring to them; his approach shows the difference between being constrained or trapped by tradition and inhabiting it, fully, with as much invention and earnestness as he can muster. The apparent hubris that leads him to invoke Aeschylus can also be read as a gesture of humility: an acknowledgment that nothing, under the sun or on the screen, is new. And yet even when we can see what’s coming—whether for us or the people we love so unconditionally and futilely—we’re surprised all the same; that life is a matter of blind spots; that we all share in the wealth of tears.
