(Check out Brandon Wilson’s Paper Tiger movie review, it’s in theaters Friday, November 13. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
James Gray has been to space. James Gray has been to the Amazon. But James Gray is always, no matter where he is, in Queens. And for the second film in a row, he has returned to the Queens of his youth to tell another story based loosely on his own family history. Paper Tiger is set in 1986, 6 years after the events depicted in his 2022 film Armageddon Time. Together, the films create a diptych of innocence lost and a country’s moral decline into the state of affairs we are currently fighting our way out of.
Paper Tiger was originally conceived as a sequel to Armageddon Time, but Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway (who played a married couple and the parents of the protagonist), both dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. Even though it’s tempting to imagine how they would approach the material, the film benefits ultimately from being a brother film rather than an outright sequel. You have to imagine at some point Gray will make one more and make it a Queens Trilogy.
Armageddon Time was set at the dawn of the Reagan Era and the peripheral presence of a pair of Trumps gave the film a kind of national import. Paper Tiger is set in the middle of Reagan’s second term and no family members of future presidents are present. This is the story of the Pearl family, a middle class Jewish family with working class roots. The father, Irwin (played by Miles Teller) is an engineer, and the mother, Hester (played by Scarlett Johansson) dotes on her two high school aged sons Scott and Ben (played by Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel, respectively).
One night, Irwin’s larger than life ex-cop brother shows up with dinner. Gary Pearl (played by Adam Driver) is a very different man from his brother. He is charming, magnetic, and seems like a man with all the angles figured out. His perfectly coiffed hair and suits and the ankle holstered snub nosed .38 he rakishly flashes to his awed nephews are meant to make us question who exactly Gary is and how he earns a living. When he proposes a business deal to his brother, we know, thanks to the quote from Aeschylus that opens the film, that things are not going to go well.
The cast of Paper Tiger is uniformly strong, particularly Driver and Johansson. It could be argued that Johansson, who handles her accent and is completely believable as a Queens mom, has never been better. She and Driver are so good that Teller seems to get overshadowed, particularly since his character has little to do once he makes a fateful mistake that puts his family in jeopardy. I cannot imagine Jeremy Strong’s dad character in Armageddon Time fading this way, but Irwin Pearl is not nearly as volatile as Strong’s Irving Graff was. In any case, the early scenes of the family all together, the calm before the storm, play beautifully and give the rest of the film stakes.
As our pre-eminent outer borough auteur, Gray deftly gives us a very specific sense of time and place. Even though the rooms keep changing, this is in essence a chamber piece. It is a film about people in negotiation with each other, and sometimes, with themselves. It’s a film about the moment when you realize your options have dwindled down to one and it’s the one you have dreaded your whole life. It’s very telling that the first act of physical violence by one of the Pearls is shot in a wide shot, and outside of the store where the clash occurs. This is a bold statement by Gray, because any other filmmaker would have made a meal out of this brief flash of mayhem. But that’s not what Gray is after, he keeps us at a distance, because that show of force will ultimately not save the Pearls from their fate.
Gray tends to prefer the slow burn over pyrotechnics. And that may be why his career has moved at a fairly level trajectory since his 1994 debut film Little Odessa (which also feels like a brother film to this one). This is in no way meant as a slight against the director. Gray is simply part of a vanishing tradition in American Cinema. Paper Tiger is another addition to this very specific body of work, one in which the story of America can be told with any house in any borough of the biggest city in the nation.
– Brandon D. Wilson (@GeniusBastard)
