'Paper Tiger' Is the Best Film of James Gray's Career

Besides some excursions to outer space (Ad Astra) and the jungles of Brazil (The Lost City of Z), writer-director James Gray has made a career for himself by excavating his own back-yard — the man behind Little Odessa, The Yards, and The Immigrant adores the boroughs of New York City, most of all Queens where he himself grew up. And his latest Paper Tiger, which just opened the New York Film Festival, is no different—indeed like his previous film Armageddon Time this is the filmmaker deep in autobiographic mode, showing us a chapter of his childhood that stands out. And with good reason.

Because Paper Tiger is also the best film of James Gray’s career. This is a riveting crime thriller that contains career-best work from Adam Driver and Miles Teller as brothers who accidentally find themselves in the sights of the Russian Mafia in the 1980s, just as its power was exploding. (And yes even though the film never makes any explicit political statements, it’s hard not to watch it and think about another Queens Businessman who came up during the same period whose ties to Russian Criminals have been well-documented for decades.)

So the year is 1986 and Teller is Irwin Pearl, an engineer running a small business that’s just successful enough to maintain a happy home for his wife Linda (Scarlett Johansson, utilizing her New York roots to the hilt) and teen boys Scott and Benjamin (Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel). Irwin might be staring down the barrel of two college tuitions, and the boys do sometimes complain that his car is a piece of junk, but the family’s happy and loving and adequately comfortable in that way of middle-class life that seems a relic of the past here forty years later.

Still Irwin isn’t doing anywhere near as well as his brother Gary (Driver) is. A flashy and far more successful businessman, Gary’s always got big ideas and dollar signs in his eyes - just look at that Mercedes he’s driving! The boys sure do, and let their dad know about it every chance they can. Still Gary’s a good guy, a good brother and uncle, and seems to make his money honestly - if there are illicit things going on on the other side of the table he might look askance but his own work is on the up-and-up. A former cop, Gary prided himself on being one of the clean ones, to the point where he maybe even alienated some of his former colleagues past the breaking point. (There are many such Chekov’s guns, including actual guns.)

And so when Gary brings his brother in on an attractive looking deal attached to new efforts at cleaning up the Gowanus Canal—aka the decades-long title-holder of the filthiest waterway in the world and which divides Brooklyn and Queens—it seems like a great idea for all involved. Gary has the foresight to see that this property has a big future ahead (and if you go visit the Gowanus Canal in 2026 you’ll see how right he was), while Irwin’s got the scientific bonafides to legitimize this proposed consulting business—they’ll work with the businesses along the canal who own the land and who will need advice on how to go about cleaning it up to meet the oncoming governmental regulations. In a perfect world this would be a slam dunk idea.

Unfortunately this is no perfect world—not in James Gray’s movies nor in reality itself—and what starts with smiles and handshakes quickly disintegrates into terror, as Irwin, sweet and simple and naive to a fault, disastrously stumbles himself and his boys smack-dab into the night-time goings-on of just who’s running things there along the canal. Ignoring Gary’s rule about looking away from what’s happening on the other side of the table, Irwin unwittingly drags his entire family into the eye-line of a big-time Russian criminal named Semion Bogoyavich (Victor Ptak), with terrifying and devastating results. And all of the characteristics that made these brothers seem like winners sour real quick. Much ado for a dumb Mercedes.

The tension Gray mounts across the second half of Paper Tiger is the real deal though, by far the most gut-twisting turns he’s scored on-screen to date. This is very much in the Hitchcockian wheelhouse of all those men who knew too much, where an innocent dude finds himself dragged into a dark underworld that he was happily ignorant of before he has that happiness slapped right off his face. And there are sequences here—one in the car with the two boys, and another in a field of reeds in the bright afternoon with just the sound of airplanes passing overhead and the terrifying rustle of the leaves—that are breathless feats of movie-making, rattling you to your bones.

Not that Paper Tiger strains to go big—quite the opposite, this is still an intimate and realistic family drama akin to everything Gray’s done before. That’s where the fright comes from—how small and decent these folks are drawn, with a palpable love among them all. So where these sweet folks find themselves equates to genuine scares. And all of the actors deliver the goods on making these various bonds totally convincing—even if Johansson flirts with miscasting for simply being too gorgeous for this role, she’s great anyway; the wig and gigantic glasses are doing a lot of work (do note that she never takes those glasses off once), but if you’ve spent any time in New York you’ve met countless big-personality women exactly like her Linda. And Gray gives the actress far more to do than just be a nagging wife at home—Linda’s role is integral to the story, while being profoundly affecting to boot.

If nothing else Gray proves again here that there really are no small stories—that he’s able to pluck this tale from his own history and turn out a stunning little thriller like this makes all the corporations shelling out billions of bucks to deliver redundant trash seem all the more myopic. Staring down the enormous Manhattan skyline in the far distance through a fateful field of tall grass, Paper Tiger finds enormity in the intimate; myth in the microcosm of one Queens family. What a movie.

Paper Tiger just opened and world-premiered the New York Film Festival. It opens in U.S. theaters on November 13th.