Starring: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Miles Teller
New York-born filmmaker James Gray is, for my taste, just the right amount of grumpy. If you’ve seen any interviews with the man during the press tour for his latest masterpiece Paper Tiger, you will have noticed that he brings to his interviews a deeply critical perspective – not just of modern cinema but of modern society (Capitalism being the big one). Because of this, despite the fact that the types of projects he chooses occupy quite traditional Hollywood territory, what he focuses on within these stories is always socially probing, deeply personal, and tends to hold tragic implications.
Paper Tiger is no exception. This tense, perfectly measured crime-drama is one of his strongest releases to date. Adam Driver plays Gary Pearl – an imposing yet personable ex-cop who gets his family man brother Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) mixed up with the Russian mafia. We’re right on the cusp of a post-Soviet world, and Russian crime in New York is thriving. It makes sense that Driver’s “it’ll all be okay” showman type character wishes to get in on the action, leading to terrible consequences for those in the firing line (Irwin’s two sons as well as his wife Hester, played by Scarlett Johansson).
The fact that, with Paper Tiger, he’s returning to his old interests and motifs – making a New York-set crime thriller with historical concerns – might appear to some like a step backwards. You might view this move as Gray attempting to ground oneself after more ambitious genre works (like Ad Astra) or more risk-taking works (like Armageddon Time). But I view this movie as a fascinating summation of all his themes and aesthetic modes of working. Visually, he’s acquired a level of visual mastery which, whilst certainly dormant, was not entirely present in his earliest work that I’ve seen. Now the director is able to balance cinematic subtlety and expression with a finely trained sense of intuition – always serving the characters, the performances and a sense of narrative drive. You only need to observe the movie’s final (and really only) action set-piece to understand the care with which the camera is being used.
It’s the only sequence in which a gun is fired, despite the entire film holding the thrills of an action movie, and it’s one of the best directed things I’ve seen in a long time. I kept recalling the final set-piece of Akira Kurosawa’s wonderful Stray Dog, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Gray used it for inspiration. The way the camera holds on a face, tracks the movement of the eyes, and, through small camera adjustments and movements, places you in the psyche of our ill-fated subject. It’s all deeply refreshing, and something to behold.
On their surface, the genres in which he operates could (or should) appeal to the masses: crime, sci-fi, adventure epics – with Armageddon Time being the only subdued, art-house outlier (a great film nevertheless). And yet, why Gray’s name is not spoken in
the same breath as a Nolan or a Fincher is mystifying to me. All to say that James Gray is one of the most thoughtful, consistent and technically gifted filmmakers working today. He has a few masterpieces to his name that might remain underrated for some time: his previous film, the autobiographical Armageddon Time, is one of them – and I fear Paper Tiger may be another. It is the best English-language film I’ve had the pleasure to see at this year’s London Film Festival so far.