Vibes are not enough in this frustratingly tepid emulation of 70s crime cinema.
It’s 1986 in Queens, New York, and Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) is a blue-collar dad trying to send his kids to college. He’s sweet but schlubby and naive and worships his hotshot, ex-cop brother Gary (Adam Driver). Gary is the opposite of Irwin, suave, streetwise and ruthless when he needs to be, but never stupid. When Gary brings Irwin a business opportunity that gets them embroiled with the Russian mob, their relationship and their families’ safety are pushed to the limit. These two male leads feel like great brothers, intertwined in so many ways, but life’s just spun them in different directions. The matriarch of Irwin’s family is Linda, played with a warm strength and an exasperation resembling a sitcom mom by Scarlett Johansson. Through her own subplot about worsening health, Johansson shows a stiff upper lip and sacrifice, which, like her husband and brother-in-law, can drift towards the selfish and yet always with the best of intentions.
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With these three excellent performances, it’s striking quite how un-striking Paper Tiger is. There’s a lot of scene-setting, a lot of tension, but the whole film stays in second gear and never finds a way to get faster. When the time for emotional conflict comes, it feels muted or by the numbers. Director James Gray wastes the bedrock of character that his actors have built up. The thrills that this thriller is supposed to provide don’t happen often enough, and while there’s a brilliantly tense, minimalistic finale, it’s too little, too late. The plot feels slow, and the consequences feel rushed. It’s an almost chronically dull movie. Gray can’t mine the emotional weight that thrillers from the 70s and 80s stored. He can’t capture the tragedy, the cruelty, the hypocrisy. He can understand it; he can mimic how these films looked, but he can’t replicate it. Instead, he paddles around in the shallows of ideas about the American dream, unable to deliver a complete package.
Paper Tiger is about how life can collapse at a moment’s notice. That one seemingly innocuous choice or twist of fate can upend your life entirely. The “paper tiger” of Paper Tiger is the world that we build for ourselves, the assumptions we make about who or what we can count on, which mean very little when faced with the chaos of the universe or the darker sides of mankind. The real paper tiger, though, is the film itself. It presents itself as a prestige, 1970s-style crime drama. But Gray, in the end, fundamentally misunderstands the core components of the cinema he’s trying to emulate, beyond how it looks. This is The Godfather minus the decay of the soul; it’s The French Connection with no chase; it’s a rough stab at a style of movie without the muscle to back it up. It’s a Dad film for only the most Daddest of Dads, and I suspect they’d be better off just sticking on Serpico again.
★★
In cinemas from November 20th / Miles Teller, Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson / Dir: James Gray / Neon / TBC
