Paper Tiger Review: Adam Driver and Miles Teller Lead Great American Film
For more than half a century, the vernacular around crime and cinema has changed. Many of the films and even television series that are responsible for this shift have a method to their madness. Whether it is the majestic gravity of the Corleone family or the shiny shoe slickness of Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, these characters inhabit stories designed to reveal the seductive power of the criminal underworld that lures wayward souls to damnation. (Or, in some cases, the filmmakers just think Al Pacino looks really cool rocking a grenade launcher.)
Yet in all these years of layering new dimensions of depth and pathos to what Tony Soprano calls “this thing of ours,” what’s increasingly become obscured is just how scary that thing is—especially to many of the nine-to-five stiffs living vicariously through all that Atlantic City and Las Vegas glamour for a couple of hours in the dark.
This context makes James Gray’s hushed Paper Tiger an anomaly. Here is as old-fashioned a parable as the Hollywood programmers of the mid-20th century; the story of a square, all-American family who gets embroiled in a criminal world seething with danger. And yet, by virtue of its retro morality, the picture feels subversive opposite the modern crime movie, not to mention its own values. Because this isn’t just a solid thriller; it’s a waking nightmare about suburban folks who enter a world they can never hope to understand, but which will touch their lives in ways that can never be undone. It is the story of an actual family, and how it ends up shattered in ways far more profound than bromides about the illusory “American dream.”
The family in question is composed of the brothers Gary and Irwin Pearl (Adam Driver and Miles Teller), and the next generation Irwin built after marrying Hester (Scarlett Johansson). Hester and Irwin’s domestic life is indeed “all-American,” if in that specific late-20th century, Jewish tradition James Gray knows so well. Like his protagonists in Armageddon Times, the Queens lifestyle Irwin and Hester occupy seems semiautobiographical, especially when it is introduced through the complacent stare of their teenage son Scott (Gavin Goudey). When the kid wakes up in the movie’s first breaths, it’s 1986 outside his window, and Dad is proving his nerdiness via his flannel shirts and droning lectures about public safety (he’s an engineer who specializes in risk assessments). Meanwhile Johansson’s mother is of the protective, high-strung, high-pitched New York accent variety.
That’s probably why both of their sons idolize Adam Driver’s Gary, a former NYPD detective who made his fortune through nebulous business deals and now comes to the house with stylish suits, stylish stories, and even a chic service revolver fashionably strapped to his leg. On one such Sunday dinner, he also brings a business opportunity for his little brother: help do some consulting work for new Russian entrepreneurs cleaning up the Gowanus Canal and pocket a lot of extra cash. Unfortunately for all parties, Irwin is a little too eager to prove his usefulness to both Gary’s business associates and his boys. Hence why he takes the kids one evening down by the canal to show them what daddy does… and instead gets all of them in the sights of some incredibly scary thugs—the kind who will point a gun at a child, slap the boy’s father so hard he bleeds, and hen keep his driver’s license.
“Now we know where you live,” the bad man warns. And he’ll come calling after his boss tells Gary the next day that they need assurances neither Irwin or his sons would ever do something so foolish as to tell anyone, even Hester, about what they saw.
While watching Paper Tiger at the New York Film Festival last week, I was reminded of any number of classic morality plays about the nuclear family under siege. Films like Shane or The Desperate Hours. At the premiere, Gray put a finer point on it when he named Alfred Hitchcock’s second stab at The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956 as an influence. They’re stories about “typical” hearth and kin finding itself bewildered by forces beyond comprehension. But all of those films came with some degree of Hollywood reassurance and censorship. Just as how the more modern crime film has its familiar beats about rot belying the fantasy, these are tales of normalcy and “order” reasserting itself in the face of unnatural disruption.
What makes Paper Tiger so evocative is how Gray introduces tense, even pulpy thriller elements to his character-driven dramaturgy, but he does not diminish or ignore the human element in the process. It is in fact how real this scenario plays out that makes it absolutely terrifying when Irwin is awakened in the middle of the night to what sounds like an old Polaroid camera’s flashbulb firing up while he and his wife are sleeping—or just how vulnerable even tough-talking, worldly Gary can appear when he enters a field of tall grass, all alone in the world as an unknown number of stalkers trailing his movements vanish into the weeds behind him.
The grueling dread in both of these harrowing set-pieces is borne out of exquisite performances by Driver and Teller. The former remains one of the most fascinating actors of this era, but it’s been a long while since Driver starred in a movie this good. All cocksure swagger, Driver’s portrait of Uncle Gary is of a proud self-made man whose outer-borough boasting is always just a little too loud, his smile a smidge too flashy, and his comforting reassurances to the nephews a little too insistent. He is out to prove his place in the world, which cuts a strangely lonely silhouette, like a quarrelsome squirrel hanging to a cracking tree branch in the depths of winter.
Teller, meanwhile, seems to have discovered an unlikely sweet spot as an actor in the last year between this film and the A24 comedy Eternity: he is excellent as the nebbish, mid-20th century putz who seems perpetually baffled by the world around him. Opposite Driver, the two create an archetypal sibling rivalry, but also a more understated admiration that gives their corresponding jealousies teeth.
The third point of the film’s triangle is Johansson, who at first might seem miscast. She certainly doesn’t resemble a homebody housewife no matter how much Gray has them curl her hair or drape the nightgowns. But as the movie progresses, Hester might get the meatiest scenes of the film. She is not one of the brothers and thus, like the audience, must forever be an outsider witnessing the sweet, but ultimately corrosive dynamic that leads to Irwin making decision after decision that puts the family at risk. It falls to Hester to therefore make the film’s hardest choices, especially as her own journey reveals absolutely devastating moments of clarity for a mother seeing the careful home life she built crumble in an instance. The scene where that fragility clicks for her is some of the finest acting in Johansson’s career.
It is the awareness of the film and, eventually, the characters that such domestic niceties are delicate, ephemeral things which turns what might have been a simple potboiler into a substantial American melodrama. None of our core three ever get the full picture of the forces that are about to irrevocably shape and possibly wreck their lives. But each in their own way will be forced to confront what happens when that innocence they take granted, and have on a shelf, is now tumbling to the hard floor. There are no easy answers once that happens, and no way to cleanly pick up the pieces. It’s what can give fleeting moments their beauty. Or tragedy.
Paper Tiger opens on Nov. 13 in limited release and wide on Nov. 20.
