“Another jewel in Gray’s crown of stories about the struggle that is the American Dream.”

“Let there be wealth without tears;
enough for the wise man who will ask no further” – Aeschylus, Agamemnon

In America, land of greed, men will always ask further. But wealth is not measured in dollars alone; it would have saved the characters in James Gray’s neo-noirish crime thriller Paper Tiger a lot of trouble if they had realised that. Ambition gets in the way of brotherhood in a capitalist society that teaches the American Dream still exists. Or at least that’s how it was in 1986, the year Paper Tiger is set in. Expertly directed, and featuring a tense shootout that will have your stomach in a knot, the film’s closest and most obvious kin is Gray’s own ’90s crime thriller Little Odessa, although J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year is also a good reference point. A strong return to form for the American director after the failure that was Armageddon Time, Paper Tiger is thematically heavier then initially hits the eye, although it falters somewhat in the writing for the only female character of note in the film.

Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) and his wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) have it made. An engineer by trade, he can afford a comfortable home in Queens, New York, for their family of four, and even travel to Europe for vacation, a luxury not many Americans can enjoy, certainly not in 1986. A call from Irwin’s brother Gary (Adam Driver) could mean another step up for the family. Gary, seemingly the embodiment of the American Dream as a former police inspector-turned-contractor who has some money to throw around, tells Irwin they can have the inside track in securing the job of cleaning up Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a project in which Irwin’s engineering knowledge and Gary’s ways around City Hall will be invaluable. The mob is gone, says Gary, and now they will have Russian businessmen to deal with. They’re immigrants without much knowledge of permits and such, says Gary, what could go wrong? Well, everything. One night Irwin takes his sons Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Benjamin (Roman Engel) to check out the project’s prospective site. He notices a fire hazard and, in all his innocence, wants to notify the Russians of it. Turns out they are businessmen that come with air quotes: the Italian mafia has been replaced with a Russian one. After a frightening evening for Irwin and the boys, and later a break-in at their Queens home that is meant as a threat, Gary tells Irwin he will fix it. He still has a lot of friends on the force, after all. Or so he thinks.

In typical Gray fashion, especially when it comes to his crime stories, rare bursts of violence punctuate a film that is mostly simmering with tension. The nighttime visit of a Russian gangster to the Pearls’ home already is a masterclass in building suspense, with Irwin unconvincingly trying to scare whoever is rummaging through their living room away, a gun Gary gave him unfirm in his shaking hands. But a shootout late in the film, when Gary has decided to sacrifice himself to save his brother’s family, takes the cake. This is where Gray gets closest to Scorsese, as Driver creeps through wheat fields hiding from the mobsters on his tail. The way the scene is orchestrated, leaving the outcome hanging in the balance through shots of stalks that could either be moving in the wind or because some hard-nosed Russian is coming through, shows how Gray is a master of mise-en-scène. The final overhead shot, showing Gary’s expected demise, could have been a perfect ending for the film, were it not for Gray’s desire to wrap up the story of Irwin and his family too.

The problem is that Gray writes himself into a corner with a side story involving Hester. Difficulties with her eyesight and a minor car accident lead to a brain tumor diagnosis, and while this gives Johansson ample material to do some serious acting aside from her ’80s wig and thick Queens accent, her story never really gels with the predicament her husband and brother-in-law find themselves in. Paper Tiger is a film about reaching for too much and not realizing that family comes before wealth, and is our actual wealth. Since Hester never tells Irwin about her illness, he has to come to this realization through his sons, two severely underwritten characters, which leaves Hester’s plot line dangling.

Johansson gives it her all, and aside from a few iffy line readings is quite convincing as a middle-aged mom from the Queens suburbs. Likewise, Teller’s bleu dad, in over his head at the first sniff of a big payoff, delivers good character work, although he is somewhat driven from the film as it goes along by his on-screen brother. Driver is a true force of nature, a man who also bit off more than he could chew, despite being more used to dealings on this sort of level, but also one who is not afraid to resort to violence at the drop of a dime. There is danger in Driver’s performance, a male confidence that can be toxic to those in his sphere, like his brother and his family. His Gary is the most well-rounded character in the cast, and one could make a case for either him or Teller as lead, but his character lingers longer simply because he has agency, whereas Irwin is mostly passive.

Most of the film’s difficulties lie in the character writing. Hester’s story seems like a leftover from when this was still to be a sequel of sorts to Armageddon Time, and the two sons exist only to underline what a happy, perfect American family Irwin has. The Russian spider in a global mob web also lacks definition. One can’t escape the feeling that if Gray had shifted the focus more to Gary he could have leaned more heavily on the idea behind Aeschylus’ quote and through Driver’s character found a way to bring the theme of ‘family is wealth’ across; the film basically does that already through Gary’s sacrifice. Still, with Gray’s strong direction and a trio of outstanding performances, Driver first and foremost, Paper Tiger is another jewel in Gray’s crown of stories about the struggle that is the American Dream.