Paper Tiger

There’s a joy in watching a filmmaker returning to a place they know inside out. Every gesture, every local tradition, every character’s aspiration is shot through with local knowledge. Scorsese has it with Little Italy, Tarantino with LA, and James Gray definitely has it with Queens, the New York borough he grew up in and that he’s quietly immortalising on screen.

Its low-rise streets, in the shadows of Manhattan’s bright lights, were the setting for his debut, Little Odessa (1994), and two subsequent crime dramas We Own the Night (2007) and The Yards (2012). And it’s the backdrop for an unshowy but enthralling late ’80s parable of aspiration gone wrong that reunites Marriage Story duo Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson to great effect.  

Johansson is Hester Pearl, the warm-hearted matriarch of a middle-class Jewish family in one of the borough’s leafy streets. Her husband, Irwin (Miles Teller), is an engineer for whom geeky enthusiasm is a default setting. Cooing relatives would probably refer to their two children, 18-year-old Scott (Gavin Goudey), off to college in the spring, and his doting younger brother Ben (Roman Engel), as ‘polite young men’. Irwin, though, is fretting about the tuition fees, especially with Hester also angling for a new home among the swimming pools and lawns of Long Island.

Into this happy but pressured dynamic steps Driver’s older brother Gary Pearl, an ex-cop with the gift of the gab and an unmissable business opportunity for Irwin. Turning up at the family’s house with a Peter Luger steakhouse delivery, two chefs and a silver tongue, he’s soon persuading his brother to help a local business concern clear an oil-polluted waterway.

An unshowy but enthralling late-’80s parable of aspiration gone wrong

But the business is actually a cover for the Russian mob, and far from being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the job is a collision course with the violent side of the American dream. As Gary shows off his ankle-holstered gun to his starstruck nephews in the kitchen, you can practically hear Chekhov slotting bullets into the chamber.

Irwin, of course, is fathoms out of his depth in this ruthless world, and his over-eager misstep leaves the entire family in hock to a blank-faced crime boss (Victor Ptak). But Gary is also operating with an outdated playbook, and Driver puffs him up with overconfidence as he parlays with the Russians in Brighton Beach back rooms and tetchy payphone calls. These scenes are expertly mounted by Gray, who slowly cranks up the tension with an excruciatingly tense home invasion sequence straight out of a horror film.  

But the storytelling doesn’t quite live up to the craft and performances. Johansson is strong as the fiercely protective Hester but gets marooned in a medical subplot with no pay-off. Teller is very watchable, too, as Irwin’s ebullience drains away in the face of a cadre of Russian psychopaths. Driver is the star of the show, though, and a great reason to watch Gray’s rugged and robust addition to his Queens canon.

Paper Tiger premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.