Writer-director James Gray’s Paper Tiger—playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival—is that second kind, though to even classify it as a thriller risks putting it in a rigid box that can’t hold its complex contours. It’s about a family, a group of people who don’t know how happy they are until suddenly they aren’t. It’s about brothers who both resent and look after one another, the Janus head paradox that rules so many sibling relationships, often intensifying loyalty rather than weakening it. It’s about the loneliness of being a parent, in moments when you can’t protect your children or, perhaps worse, when you’re so intent on protecting them that you find yourself on an island of isolation, overwhelmed by your own fears but unable to express them. In places, this picture is wrenchingly tense, as if Gray were discovering a gift he didn’t know he had, playing on the audience’s nerves the way you’d gently tighten the pegs on a violin. Paper Tiger is old school in the best way, the kind of movie so many American directors have forgotten how to make, if they ever learned in the first place.
The brothers’ personalities are distinctive from the start. When Gary invites himself to Irwin’s house for dinner to talk business, at least he brings the dinner: it’s a meal for the whole family from Peter Luger’s Steakhouse, ferried in with a flourish by actual waiters from the restaurant. Gary is freewheeling, glamorous, a little mysterious, and Scott and Benjamin adore him: He performs card tricks at the table—you get the sense his knack for sleight of hand extends to his business dealings. When the boys ask, he shows them the gun he wears under his pants leg, strapped into a garter holster. Irwin, meanwhile, is a windbreaker dad, a guy who putters around the yard doing what needs to be done, earnest about supporting his family but also a little clueless about the larger world. The first meeting he and Gary have with the Brooklyn Russians doesn’t seem to faze him, even though it’s presided over by a shady mobster lackey and takes place in a paneled trailer with a tacky stuffed marlin mounted on the wall. He steps out to survey the canal, and we see it through his eyes: the layer of shimmery gunk atop the water makes it look almost magical. (The cinematographer here is Joaquín Baca-Asay, and he and Gray shot the picture on film—it has a gently scuffed, lived-in look.)
Irwin’s bad judgment, Gary’s overconfidence, Hester’s realization that just about the only thing that matters to her, caring for her family, may be in jeopardy: suddenly, seemingly small things, quirks or character traits people live with and work around every day, have become seeds of tragedy for this small, tight group. Paper Tiger is a picture about everyday things, about what you can lose in a heartbeat if you’re not careful, or even just unlucky. It’s a thriller filled with tenderness, the kind you can make only when you’ve got performers who know what they’re doing: Teller plays Irwin’s naivete not as a pitiable state but merely a deeply unfortunate one; even so, it becomes a cause of shame for him, a burden almost too great to bear. Johansson is superb here. A brief scene in which she pictures an unimaginable future for her family is so compact and potent that it becomes a quiet anchor for the movie. And for Driver’s Gary, everything is an outsized gesture. He swings his long limbs freely just because they’re there. He’s been blessed; he’s the can-do guy who can do anything. When he realizes he can’t, the molten despair in his eyes is nearly unbearable.
Movies, particularly mainstream American movies, the sorts of pictures that would have filled theaters 20 or maybe even 10 years ago, are in a dark place right now. Paper Tiger is one of only two American pictures in the Cannes competition this year. (The other is Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love.) Right now, Hollywood studios, what’s left of them, just aren’t producing the kinds of films that can shine on a stage this big. But even at a time when we’ve had to temper our expectations of what a movie can be, Paper Tiger is almost everything you could want in a grown-up movie. It’s the kind of picture you make, maybe, when you see the landscape around you narrowing instead of expanding. Your choices? Go big or go home. With Paper Tiger, Gray does both.
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