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 upmarket, beyond their financial means – 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). And 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 probably need the same support in the foreseeable. 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 immigrant interests, which are quickly expanding in mid-1980s America, are planning 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 (improbable) outing has disastrous consequences. Irwin and his sons witness oil and toxic waste being dumped in the canal. The men 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 an engineer 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 – and the start of Gary’s, when he starts trying to sort things out with the new clients.
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 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 the viewer’s increasing sense that James Gray is working up the Pearls’ ordeal 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 strikingly with the film’s mafia theme. In The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola and his cinematographer, Gordon Willis, contrasted the 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, it’s the main female character who operates in secret from the men. Not only does Hester eventually confide in her mother about her illness. She also – once she learns what Irwin has got mixed up in, after gangsters make a nighttime visit to the house in Queens – reports events to the FBI. Her main FBI interviewer happens to be female, too.
As this fiercely protective Jewish mother, Scarlett Johansson gives a fine performance – never more so than in Hester’s outburst when Irwin tells her what is going on. 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 maybe wants to illustrate the power of fraternal bonds (as plenty of other movies have done). 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. Gray also works 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, unduly compresses 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
