Adam Driver Is All Tragic Grandeur in Paper Tiger

I don’t know what filmmaker James Gray’s relationships are like with his siblings in his own life, or if he has any at all, but in his work, brotherly bonds take on a scope that is downright Shakespearean. In Little Odessa, a Russian-Jewish hit man played by Tim Roth can’t help but pull his younger brother Edward Furlong into his dark orbit when he goes back to his old neighborhood, as if the kid represents some kind of karmic toll for the life he’s been living. In We Own the Night, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg play brothers on different sides of the law — one manages a drug den of a nightclub, while the other is a second-generation cop in a narcotics unit — until an act of violent retaliation against one of their own gives them common cause. And in Paper Tiger, Gray’s finely wrought new film that just premiered at Cannes, Miles Teller and Adam Driver play Irwin and Gary Pearl, brothers trying to get a business venture off the ground from across their own divide. Irwin is an engineer, family man, and, in the words of his brother Gary, a “civvy” who shares a sturdy Queens existence with a wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), who wouldn’t mind moving out to Great Neck, and their sons Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel).

Gary, meanwhile, is a creature of the city in slick suits and a Mercedes, a divorced former cop who now leverages his old connections for vague, lucrative work that may not ever cross over into the explicitly illicit, but that definitely involves shades of gray. His flexible perspective on the ways the world works may be more realistic than that of his square younger sibling, but Paper Tiger is a tragedy with the momentum of a thriller that proves that neither of the Pearl brothers really understands how times are changing. Gary sees an opportunity to get in on the lucrative government contracts to clean up the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn now that the Mafia’s control of the area has faded. Irwin, meanwhile, has an idealist’s vision of what the initiative could accomplish, showing his kids the blighted industrial area and announcing that “This is all going to be primo real estate one day.” He’s not wrong, though it’ll take longer than he imagines.

It’s 1986 in New York, the city is ramping up toward its worst years of crime, and the Genovese family may have been reduced to the capacity of a red sauce joint, but the Russians are stepping in to fill the vacuum, and they’re much more formidable than even Gary, with his vaunted street smarts, understands. Gray has enough regular elements that he returns to — brothers, the Russian mob, the outer boroughs in the ‘80s — that it sometimes feels like he’s fitting the same pieces into different configurations in an effort to figure out a particular masterpiece that’s been sitting unrealized inside him. Paper Tiger isn’t it, but it’s a propulsively effective drama in which a naive act on Irwin’s part becomes the first domino in a toppling row that will end in the implosion of a family. A well-intentioned unscheduled visit to one of the companies that Gary has been trying to pitch compliance consulting to leads to Irwin drawing the unwelcome attention of its real owner, a frightening Brighton Beach-based boss named Simeon Bogoyavich (Victor Ptak).

From there, things go to shit so skillfully that Paper Tiger becomes an experience in marinating with dread, as all the characters try to shield one another by keeping secrets. Driver, for all that he’s associated with brooding, is also good at showboating, and his Gary maintains the chintzy swagger of someone who likes to be seen as a big shot capable of handling any problem. (He shows up in the movie with a basically apocryphal delivery order from the famous steakhouse Peter Luger, an incredibly specific local flex.) But the more that we see of him outside the family, the more we understand that he’s basically spent his life doing this performance with Irwin as his intended audience. He wants, desperately, to look like a hero to his brother, like someone who could swoop in with impossible-to-get porterhouse and drop $10,000 on the guy for a night’s work with the promise of more to come, like he’ll usher them all into the dream of the go-go ’80s personally.

Driver ably brings the heartbreak in Paper Tiger, though Johansson’s no slouch in a less ornate but no less harrowing role that involves her character having a health scare and having to develop a very different perspective on the future. Irwin, at first, looks like the protagonist of the film, a naive man who has faith in hard work and straight shooting and providing a better life for his kids, and who seems doomed to be pushed into terrible things. Instead, he becomes a somehow sadder figure — someone whose earnestness has to be protected as much as the innocence of his children, as though the beliefs he embodies are so rare and fragile that they can’t be exposed to the harsh realities going on a few miles down the road.