See it in theaters, on 35mm if a print is within driving distance. James Gray’s Paper Tiger is being sold by Neon as a crime picture about a Gowanus Canal scheme, and it works well enough as one, but what it actually is turns out to be a tragedy about a decent man who ruins his family in small, reasonable steps. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney calls it arguably Gray’s best film, and the case is hard to argue with.
The year is 1986, the borough is Queens, and Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) is an engineer who builds storm windows and writes risk reports for a living, a job the film treats as foreshadowing rather than detail. His brother Gary (Adam Driver), a divorced ex-cop turned security consultant, arrives one night with a trunkful of Peter Luger steaks and an offer: the canal cleanup needs an engineer who can translate city code for the Russian businessmen taking over the waterfront, and the fee is $10,000. By the time the job curdles, the brothers owe those same Russians $150,000, and Irwin’s wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) has started dreaming about a suburb the family can no longer afford honestly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLwTyQOhBkw
Gray’s single best choice is the one he makes before any character speaks. The film opens on a line from Aeschylus, “Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further,” then cuts to a stretch of reedy marshland that David Ehrlich recognizes as the exact shot that closed Gray’s We Own the Night two decades ago. It is an odd way to begin a movie about storm windows, and it works because it tells the audience immediately that the scheme’s success was never the question. The marsh, shot on 35mm by Joaquín Baca-Asay, keeps surfacing underneath the plot as the thing the characters refuse to look at directly.
Driver gives the performance the reviews are built around, and the record backs that up without much argument. Ehrlich calls it a career-best turn that moves through “flash, menace, and pure sincerity like a foot stepping down on a bed of nails without drawing blood,” a description that fits a man whose love language is a blue Mercedes, an ankle holster and card tricks at the dinner table (the least subtle foreshadowing of the year, and it lands anyway). Gray told Vulture that Gary is a composite built from “a guy who wound up dying under mysterious circumstances,” his own father’s brother and a business partner, which is a strange amount of grief to pour into the character who gets the best lines. The Russian who looks at Irwin’s paperwork and says, “So now we know where you live,” is, by Rooney’s account, the most chilling moment in the film, and Driver spends the whole picture making sure the audience believes Gary never saw it coming either.
Johansson plays Hester as a woman carrying a diagnosis she will not name, and AP’s Lindsey Bahr reads her as “a physical manifestation of the polluted canal,” sick from within while her husband poisons the family finances from without. The metaphor is not subtle, and it does not need to be. Teller has the harder, quieter job, playing Irwin as a man who wants to be the father his sons brag about and never quite understands what he is willing to pay for the privilege, and the gap between those two things is where the tragedy actually lives.
Gray has been working this ground since Little Odessa in 1994, which gave its mother a brain tumor because Gray’s own mother had one, a detail Rooney flags as the closing of a very long loop. The Yards, We Own the Night, The Immigrant and Armageddon Time all run on the same outer-borough math of family debt and family loyalty, and Paper Tiger actually started as a direct sequel to Armageddon Time before Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong’s other commitments forced a recast with Teller and Johansson. The swap looks like good fortune now. Gray wanted “something almost Hitchcockian,” and what he built instead is his most finished tragedy, a long way from the rougher crime pictures that made his name and that the Academy mostly ignored (Ad Astra’s visual effects nomination remains the only one his filmography has produced, per Hollywood Reporter’s awards coverage).
The objection worth taking seriously comes from Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, who called Gray “an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays,” and the middle stretch gives him some ammunition. Irwin’s decision to stay inside the deal after the first warning sign asks for more patience than the plot has earned. Tragedy runs on exactly that kind of blindness, though, and the closing standoff near an airport, staged with the actual roar of planes taking off overhead rather than disguising it, suggests Gray knows precisely what he is doing with the corners he cuts.
Viewers who want a clean heist, the kind with a plan, a crew and a getaway, will find this slow and its hero maddening; that crowd is better served this week by How to Rob a Bank’s tighter machinery, which treats the job as the whole point rather than the excuse. Anyone allergic to illness-as-metaphor plotting should stay home too.
The verdict holds: theaters, 35mm if one is playing nearby, and go for the family wreck rather than the crime. Neon opened the film on six screens on Nov. 13, with the wide break penciled in for Nov. 20 on the trade calendars, the same week Madden hit theaters and Prime Video on the same night as studios keep experimenting with staggered rollouts. Neon’s own marketing promises the film “everywhere Thanksgiving”:
Thanksgiving falls on Nov. 26, a week after the trades have the wide break scheduled, so call ahead before driving to a theater that may not have it yet. Gray spent three decades making personal crime films that critics loved and nobody nominated; this is the one built to finally change that math, holes in the screenplay and all.
