Film review

  • Paper Tiger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Gray (2026)

    In Paper Tiger, showing at the London Film Festival, things happen quickly – too quickly for James Gray’s family-tragedy-cum-crime-drama to be credible, even if the tempo helps make the film absorbing.  The time is 1986, the place is New York City and the family in question are the Pearls, resident in Queens, although Hester Pearl (Scarlett Johansson) is being encouraged by her mother Iris (Cindy Katz) to move out of the city – and way upmarket – to Great Neck on Long Island.  That is where Iris lives and where, she says, there’s next to no pollution.  In contrast to NYC, and particularly a notoriously contaminated Brooklyn canal.  The canal will be a key location in Gray’s story (he wrote the original screenplay).  Pollution, physical and moral, will be a central theme of Paper Tiger.

    Hester’s husband Irwin (Miles Teller) and his elder brother Gary (Adam Driver) are Queens born and raised.  Irwin runs his own small engineering business in the area.  He makes a decent living but the imminent extra costs of putting their elder son Scott (Gavin Goudey) through college are weighing on Irwin and Hester’s minds, especially since their younger boy, Ben (Roman Engel), will likely need the same help in the foreseeable future.  Irwin has always been less driven and less conspicuously successful than Gary, a former high-ranking police officer who, since retiring from NYPD, has been doing lucrative work as a private security consultant.  Gary also needs extra cash, though, to afford the divorce settlement he’s currently negotiating and maintain his expensive lifestyle (driving a Mercedes, wining and dining at high-end restaurants, etc).   One evening, he arrives at Irwin’s home with a proposition.  The Brooklyn docks area, controlled by local mafia groups for years, is now attracting a new breed of business investor:  Russian immigrants, entering mid-1980s America in rapidly increasing numbers, plan to clean up and develop the area to make big money.  Gary reckons he and Irwin can get a piece of the action – setting up Pearl brothers as an environmental consultancy, synergising Gary’s fixer skills and savvy, and Irwin’s technical know-how.

    Although supposedly cautious by nature, Irwin says yes to Gary’s proposal within a couple of screen minutes.  As soon as he does so, the brothers head for the canal site.  Next morning, Irwin returns there, taking measurements and photos and attracting the suspicion of a security guard.  That night, he drives Scott and Ben to the site, even though Hester protests that it’s late and the boys have school tomorrow.  This impulsive (and improbable) outing has disastrous consequences.  Irwin and his sons witness oil and toxic waste being dumped in the canal.  Those responsible then abduct and assault Irwin, and – in a very frightening sequence – threaten his terrified children at gunpoint.  One kind of mafia in the Brooklyn docks has been replaced by another.  The canal clean-up project – recruiting engineers to help comply with NYC authority regulations, and so on – is a front for the Russian mobsters now running the show.  Irwin and his sons get back home later that night in one piece, but this is far from the end of their trauma – or of Gary’s, once he tries to sort things out with his Russian clients, and their sinister boss man (Victor Ptak).

    It was also on the morning after Gary’s fateful visit to their home that Hester and the two boys had a car accident.  She was driving them to school when she suddenly couldn’t see where she was going and veered off the road.  No one was hurt and the temporary blindness might have been caused by dazzling sunlight, but the film’s audience can confidently guess there’s more to it than that.  It’s not long before Hester visits a doctor, gets a scan, learns she has terminal brain cancer.  Her plight, on the one hand, compounds a viewer’s increasing sense that James Gray is overworking the Pearls’ ordeal, and in double-quick time.  On the other hand, Hester’s decision not to tell her husband or sons about her condition (although increasingly hard to credit) articulates interestingly with the film’s mafia theme.  In The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola and his cinematographer, Gordon Willis, contrasted the predominantly shadowed world where the Corleone men did their business with sunny scenes of the domestic life they shared with wives and children:  throughout the film, and into The Godfather: Part II (1974), Coppola developed as a tantalising theme how much the women knew or didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) about the extent of the family’s criminal operations.  In Paper Tiger, the main female character operates in secret from the men but communicates with other women.  Hester confides solely in her mother about her illness.  After gangsters get into their house one night and Irwin tells his wife what’s going on, Hester independently reports this to the FBI:  her interviewer there is also female.

    As this fiercely protective Jewish mother, Scarlett Johansson gives a fine performance – never more so than in Hester’s outburst when Irwin confesses to her.  Johansson’s powerful combination of anger and disbelief is very badly needed by this stage of the narrative.  The film’s opening scenes build a succinct, convincing picture of the Pearls’ family life – which has its difficulties and tensions but is fundamentally happy and responsibly organised.  The sudden, astonishing overturning of this life demands the level of reaction that Johansson supplies.  Paper Tiger is well acted throughout but the writing of the main male roles is frustrating.  Gray doesn’t give Miles Teller the opportunities he needs to bring out Irwin’s horror at what he’s let happen, while Adam Driver is playing a character that doesn’t add up.  He’s clearly meant to have sold his soul to the devil, but Gary often seems naïve rather than corrupt.  If he’s as well connected as he claims to be, it’s surprising that he needs to involve unambitious Irwin in the first place.  It doesn’t help that Gary’s NYPD standing is hard to get a handle on.  One minute, he’s the invited speaker at a retirement ceremony for a high-ranking ex-colleague; the next, he’s told by former workmates that he can no longer expect favours from them.

    Gray probably means to illustrate the dreadful power of a fraternal bond – in the closing scene, as Irwin tells his sons how much he loves them, the camera pauses on Scott and Ben as if to underline that they’re the next generation of indissoluble brotherhood.  Plenty of other movies (not least the Godfather films!) have done a better job of that, though.  Gray also pushes the toxic pollution theme too hard (Hester’s doctor even suggests it’s a possible cause of her brain cancer) and, almost to the end, keeps compressing the action, presumably for dramatic impact but to implausibly melodramatic effect:  Scott’s eighteenth birthday party is the occasion for Irwin and Gary to reconcile, for Hester to tell her mother she’s dying, and more – before Gary leaves the party to meet his fate.  (Predictable as that is, the sequences ending in his death are very well put together.)  The film’s on-screen epigraph is from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – ‘Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further’.  This is a precept that Gary would obviously have done well to heed, though it’s a stretch to suggest it applies equally to Irwin.  In retrospect, that Aeschylus quote feels tragically portentous but at least James Gray’s use of Christopher Spelman’s tragic score is rationed by comparison with the music in Elsinore.

    11 October 2026

     

  • Wild Horse Nine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin McDonagh (2026)

    He started creative life as a playwright, but Martin McDonagh has developed into a director of cinema that looks good and moves fluently.  Wild Horse Nine – his fifth feature, showing at the London Film Festival shortly before general release in British cinemas – is further proof of that.  (As on three of the four previous features, Ben Davis is the cinematographer.  Mikkel E G Nielsen is McDonagh’s film editor for the second time.)  McDonagh remains a writer at heart, though, and his great facility for dialogue limits him as a filmmaker.  His screen work specialises in smart black-comedy writing that often boils down to show-off cynicism, with an occasional dash of supposedly leavening human feeling.  Wild Horse Nine is proof of this, too – more objectionable proof than either of McDonagh’s two preceding pictures, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).  That’s largely because this time he’s dealing with serious political material – but superficially.

    It’s 1973, shortly before the coup d’état in Chile that will overthrow Salvador Allende’s government, the first democratically elected Marxist administration in Latin American history.  Two CIA men – grizzled veteran Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and his younger, though longstanding, partner Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) – travel from Santiago to Easter Island.  The visit has apparently been planned as a short break for the pair, before they resume work as part of the CIA’s efforts to destabilise the Allende regime and facilitate its military overthrow and replacement by the junta led by Augusto Pinochet.  But Lee’s reports back to base rattle CIA bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi).  At Santiago airport, Chris gets into conversation with two Chilean college students, Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), and tells them what’s scheduled to happen in their country on 11 September (that really was the date of the coup d’état).  MJ also learns, to his horror, that Chris has decided to write his memoirs.  Lee is instructed by his boss to kill the man who was once his mentor, is now an intolerably loose cannon.

    MJ doesn’t know that Lee is already expecting to end Chris’s life in the home of the great moai statues – at Chris’s request.  The older man is terminally ill with cancer, addicted to morphine and showing increasing signs of dementia, though he still knows what he intends to put in the story of his CIA career.  At the airport, Monica and Alicia were also en route to Easter Island; Chris is determined to keep talking to them there, though what he says to the students repeatedly causes offence.  One of these two young women is not what she seems:  unbeknown to Monica, Alicia is an undercover CIA operative.  When MJ gets anxious enough to fly over to sort things out, it’s Alicia who meets his plane.  Not much screen time later, both he and she (and other agents who converge on Easter Island) will have died violently.  Chris is Wild Horse Nine’s last fatality yet his death – on a hillside, where horses that the film’s named for graze – is rather more peaceful.  Never mind that Chris has meanwhile learned about Lee’s dilemma, which translates into an insoluble conundrum for Chris.  When Lee pulls the trigger, Chris won’t know – as he tells his companion – if Lee has respected Chris’s wishes or complied with CIA orders.  This tension fuels the climax to Wild Horse Nine.

    It’s no surprise that actors like working with a filmmaker who gives them dramatic character arcs, along with juicy lines, and McDonagh is once more rewarded with strong performances from his main players.  By comparison with his flamboyant role in Three Billboards, it’s quite slim pickings here for Sam Rockwell, and Lee’s phone calls home to his feckless wife (Parker Posey) seem like filler, but Rockwell does a good job, especially in conveying Lee’s mixture of puzzlement and fellow feeling with Chris, whom Lee doesn’t fully understand.  Wild Horse Nine is John Malkovich’s film, though.  Malkovich is a past master of bone-dry delivery.  If he did no more than speak Chris’s many withering one-liners, it would be enough to keep many audience members happy, but he does a good deal more than that with the character.  Confessing his CIA sins, phoning his estranged brother (Tom Waits), not committing suicide – these all matter to Catholic Chris:  Malkovich portrays someone scared of losing his mind, of dying and perhaps of what might follow death.  He also ingeniously suggests a man whose increasing cynicism about his life’s work has mutated into a kind of grief.

    That John Malkovich can’t go even further is because Martin McDonagh hasn’t the imaginative sympathy to explore whether Chris – or Lee, let alone Steve Buscemi’s MJ (who proves to be the junkie that Chris keeps saying he is) – might have joined the CIA for what once seemed to them principled motives.  In contrast to Malkovich’s acting, McDonagh’s direction is transparent.  It’s right enough to regret the Nixon administration’s role in the Chilean military coup, the ousting of Allende, the horrors of the Pinochet regime – but it’s also politically correct to do so.  The same goes for the 1961 arrest and murder of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of what had been the Belgian Congo (and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), by Katangan separatists in cahoots with Belgian mercenaries and the CIA.  At the start of Wild Horse Nine, McDonagh inserts newsreel footage of events in Chile in 1973.  Soon after that, Chris imparts to a tape-recorder his career highlights, including the Lumumba assassination.  McDonagh includes news film of that too, and for the same reason.  He wants to make clear that what happened to Allende and Lumumba is no laughing matter.  It’s different with the 1963 Kennedy assassination, in which Chris also claims involvement.  McDonagh knows that the proliferating conspiracy theories, the grassy knoll etc, have turned the killing of JFK into political mythology as much as political history.  Plenty of people over the years have mined the mythology for comedy and McDonagh now joins their number, as Chris threatens to spill the beans about who really was responsible for the assassination.  The LFF audience I was in lapped this up.  McDonagh doesn’t include newsreel from Dallas.

    This is only the third McDonagh feature I’ve seen, but it echoes the other two in important ways.  A pair of men who work together:  one short-fused, the other trying to control a situation; one terminally ill, one looking for atonement.  Those two things, combined in the Malkovich character, were split between Woody Harrelson and Rockwell in Three Billboards.  An established friendship suddenly in peril, like Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s in The Banshees of Inisherin.  McDonagh majors in male characters rather than female.  (The plot synopses and cast lists for his earlier films, In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), neither of which I’ve seen, speak for themselves.)  He seems to think men, although dependably worse than women, are also more interesting.  Ingmar Bergman often gave that impression, too.  A difference is that Bergman, in dramatising this attitude, wrote many good women’s roles (played by a group of superlative actresses, as they were called in those days).  Kerry Condon’s character, the sanest and most likeable person in Banshees, disappeared from the film halfway through.  Mariana di Girolamo’s Monica is her nearest equivalent in Wild Horse Nine; Monica stays the course, but this is still a relatively skinny role.  The major exception to all this, of course, is the heroine of Three Billboards, though you could argue that even Mildred Hayes isn’t, on paper, a fully developed individual woman but, rather, a fusion of female archetype (the mother) and Hollywood western male archetype (the rightful avenger).  It’s just fortunate for McDonagh that Mildred was incarnated, and thoroughly humanised, by Frances McDormand.

    Also as before, McDonagh occasionally can’t resist little flourishes that he wants including, even when they don’t really make sense.  It’s Chris rather than Lee who says outrageous things in social situations:  Lee’s furious outburst at a smug English couple in a restaurant on Easter Island, seems inexplicable beyond giving Sam Rockwell a bit more to do in the scene as a whole.  There’s a change of plan for a while – for Chris and Lee to head to Venice for Chris’s execution – but it’s eventually abandoned:  chatting on the hillside in the film’s finale, Chris mentions Venice for the last time, admitting ‘that ship has sailed’, before correcting ‘ship’ to ‘gondola’.  Lee says ‘gondola’ at just the same time, again giving Rockwell a chance to join in.  The moai help greatly to convey a sense that the protagonists find themselves in terra incognita, psychologically as well as actually.  Carter Burwell has, as usual, written McDonagh an effective score.  But when a filmmaker is pressing audience buttons, as Martin McDonagh is doing here, it’s always worse hearing the results of his success.  It was probably a mistake to see this film in a packed Royal Festival Hall, where knowing laughter was also a form of virtue signalling.  If I’d waited a few weeks and watched it in a sparsely populated Curzon Richmond, I might not have felt so hostile to Wild Horse Nine.  I doubt I’d have thought differently about it, though.

    10 October 2026

     

     

     

     

     

     

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