It’s the final weekend of summer in 1986, upwardly aspirant Jewish families across Queens are still crowding around country club pools to make sure they get their annual money’s worth, and — in a little less than two months — the Mets are going to win the World Series for what might be the last time in team history. But nebbishy engineer Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) doesn’t know that yet. He doesn’t know that this is his golden age. He doesn’t know that this is as good as it’s ever going to get.
What Irwin knows is that greed is good. That the income gap is widening at an unprecedented rate, that economic mobility is slowing to a crawl, and that his giant older brother Gary (Adam Driver) — a divorced ex-police officer who swans around the city like a majestic bird in a blue Mercedes — has started to make him feel even smaller than usual. What Irwin knows is that his mother-in-law wants him to move the family to Great Neck, that the older of his two bickering teenage sons wants an expensive party for his 18th birthday, and that his beautiful wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) wants fewer things to worry about. Irwin isn’t the overly ambitious sort, but a man can only live in the suburbs of Mt. Olympus for so long before it starts to feel like the gods are taunting him to claim a small piece of it for himself.
And so the stage is set for James Gray’s deft and devastating “Paper Tiger,” a Jewish-American tragedy in a teapot that — like all of the writer/director’s best films — is both sweepingly mythic and hauntingly personal all at once. That double effect, once a magic trick that Gray’s movies would manage to pull off by the time they ended, has since become the de facto starting condition of his singular auto-cinema, which continues to pick at his formative wounds by processing them through the classics.
As indebted to Aeschylus as “Ad Astra” was to Joseph Campbell, or “The Lost City of Z” was to Henri Rousseau, “Paper Tiger” begins with a telling quote from the ancient playwright’s most famous text: “Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further.” Even more telling, however, is the opening shot that follows, which surveys the same reedy marshland — or at least one identical to it — from the end of “We Own the Night.” It’s no surprise that a project first conceived as a direct sequel to 2022’s “Armageddon Time” should point back to Gray’s previous work, but never before has it been so clear, so fast, that he’s trying to process his own, highly specific experience by assimilating it into the curriculum that first taught him how to make sense of the world. The more acutely self-referential his films get, the more broadly they speak to the soft and immortal agony that propels their characters forward.
It’s an agony that goes by many (sur)names, but is colloquially referred to as “family.” “Paper Tiger” is many things, chief among them a textbook parable about the American Dream, a breathless thriller about a working-class schmuck who gets mixed up with the Russian mafiya, and a pleasantly open question about why Miles Teller has rededicated his career to cosplaying as “Lost in America”-era Albert Brooks (to my mind, a canny, convincing way of aging up the nonconformist spunk that first defined his screen image in the days of “Whiplash” and “The Spectacular Now”). But, at its most nuclear level, “Paper Tiger” is — to an even more explicit degree than “Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” and any of the other James Gray movies that it hungrily mulches into something all its own — a remarkably knowing and perceptive film about how family is, and has always been, the ultimate devil’s bargain. Our greatest strength and our heaviest cross to bear. The reason our most dangerous risks can seem worth taking, and the most valuable thing we risk by taking them.
Irwin gives “Paper Tiger” its shape, but it’s how Gary navigates those dilemmas that gives the film its soul. Heartbreakingly portrayed by Adam Driver in a career-best performance that stretches across flash, menace, and pure sincerity like a foot stepping down on a bed of nails without drawing blood, Gary is a vintage ’80s showboat who only knows how to show affection by offering to share in his apparent success. He strides into Irwin and Hester’s living room — after months of radio silence — with the razzle dazzle of a local celebrity and a fully catered feast from Peter Luger’s Steak House in tow for good measure. Irwin’s sons marvel at the gun their uncle still keeps holstered around his ankle (cool!), and his wide-eyed wife looks across the kitchen table and imagines what her life might have been like had she held out for the shinier Pearl.
At least, that’s what Irwin seems to imagine that his wife is imagining, though he’d sooner let such fears fester inside of him for the rest of his natural life than to speak them aloud. For all of the character’s frustrated aspirations for a better life, Teller endows him with the wizened humility of a second-generation Jewish immigrant who knows that it would be gauche to forsake what his late father-in-law — tempting to picture as Anthony Hopkins for continuity’s sake — sacrificed to make possible for their family. Irwin might even be smart enough to recognize that his brother is an empty promise in a tailored suit, but, in a less literal expression of the double vision that will soon cause his wife to crash her car into a tree, being smart isn’t the same as seeing things clearly.
Whatever the case, Irwin is powerless to resist his brother’s sales pitch when Gary lures him into the basement to reveal the reason purpose of his visit: An ambitious new business venture is seeping its way into the Gowanus Canal, and it could use a sharp engineer to help facilitate their plans for the waterway. Still connected to the gills after getting rich in the private sector, Gary doesn’t tell his naive kid brother that said venture is the Russian mob, but the beauty of it is that he doesn’t have to. It can just be another one of the many different things that Irwin doesn’t know. He’ll go down there, sketch a few diagrams for some bald and scary men straight out of central casting, and take home a healthy paycheck to his family (“Paper Tiger” won’t score any points for bucking mafia stereotypes, as Gray plays up their ruthlessness in order to stress how far Irwin is out of his depth).
The only problem is that Irwin takes the job as seriously as he would any other, and — to his profound regret — takes his two sons to go scope out the canal one night, where they see the Russians illegally dumping their waste into the water. The Russians don’t like that. They don’t know what he’s doing there. And, in the aftermath of a stomach-churning stick-up that twisted my guts with the queasy horror of a repressed memory, Gary is given a week to make the problem go away. Spoiler alert: Appeasing the leader of an organized crime ring isn’t as simple as cutting a check, and wouldn’t be even if Gary had access to $125,000.
It doesn’t take long for things to spiral out of control from there, as Irwin and his boys soon find themselves in the crosshairs of a turf war they are comically ill-prepared to survive, while Hester — kept in the dark for her own protection — is thrust into a different crucible that she chooses to keep secret from her husband for similar reasons. (Despite being heavily affected by period drag, Johansson’s performance is too limpid to be mistaken for caricature, growing more hollowed out and heartsick with every scene until it assumes the same void-like power that Brad Pitt once found in the farthest reaches of outer space.) Plotted with a fatalistic velocity that would make Aeschylus proud, Gray’s script corkscrews towards ruin at a sickening pace, its slick road to hell paved with a well-textured mixture of imperfect intentions.
For all of the red meat that “Paper Tiger” gets to chew off the bone, this is still a small and maybe slightly underfunded movie, its outsized impact only made possible because of the micro-details that Gray traces within and between his characters. And I’m not talking about the assortment of beepers and TaB cans, or the load-bearing shots of ’80s New York, which are all Joaquín Baca-Asay’s 35mm cinematography needs to complete the illusion of time travel. While the film is buttressed by a handful of exquisite setpieces (including a nightmarish home invasion sequence that transposes the film’s title into a piece of shadowplay, and a climactic shoutout that binds it even closer to the rest of Gray’s body of work), it’s ultimately fueled by the atomic frictions inside Driver’s performance.
To that point, the real tragedy of “Paper Tiger” isn’t that messing with the mob tears these brothers apart, but rather that it brings them together. There’s not a lot of time for fun and games, but it’s never lost on Gray that this is the most time Gary and Irwin have spent with each other in years — maybe even since they were kids. “We’ve never played in the dirt,” Gary tells Irwin as he lies to his brother about how everything about the Gowanus deal is above board. But they’re playing together now. The worse things get, the more they expose the extraordinary bond that allowed things to get so fucked up in the first place (a dynamic that becomes all the more wrenching because of how Gray transposes it onto Irwin’s sons). The worse things get, the more this movie sympathizes with Gary and Irwin for their parts in it.
It’s not that Gary is trying to do something nice for his brother, or that he’s shamelessly using Irwin to broker a lucrative deal with the Russians, but rather that everything that happens after that fateful offer stems from an inextricable braid of love and leverage. Gray is no stranger to saga about fraternal strains, but never has he so forcefully tugged at the ties that bind, or more sensitively observed how they can suffocate an entire family when a certain force pulls on them hard enough.
“Paper Tiger” is a story about a household gripped by a self-inflicted event that chokes the life out of its lungs, and precious few films have better conveyed what it feels like when the oxygen gets sucked out of a home without any hope of coming back. “We already had everything,” Irwin will eventually mutter under his breath. The deepest cut of this unshakeable tragedy is that, for the very first time, it leaves him begging for more.
Grade: A
“Paper Tiger” premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters later this year.
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