When Uncle Gary (Adam Driver) arrives at his brother’s family home in Queens, it’s in a shiny black Mercedes with a fleet of chefs from Peter Luger in tow. He performs card tricks at the dinner table and plays piano on request; his starry-eyed nephews Scotty and Ben pester him in hushed voices to see the gun he keeps holstered at his ankle. Gary’s wickedly charismatic, sharply dressed, and only slightly bitter about his pending divorce – next to little brother Irwin (Miles Teller), the mild-mannered blue collar engineer who wants to get a head start on storm window construction at 7 in the morning, he looks and moves like Cary Grant. It’s little wonder that when Gary tells him he wants to bring him in on a business deal to win canal clean-up contracts from the city, Irwin thinks it’s a mitzvah. After all, Scotty’s looking at colleges and Irwin’s desperate for his sons to have the opportunities they never did. The mafia’s stranglehold on city contracts is over, Gary assures him. The Russians are moving in, and their doors are open for business…which seems to mostly take place under the cover of darkness in waterfront warehouses that smell like sewage. 

James Gray prefaces his ninth feature with a quote from Aeschylus’ tragedy ​‘Agamemnon’ which offers some sage advice: ​“Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further.” In other words, let enough be enough. It’s 1986; the USA’s global imperity is in its death throes and the American dream slips out of grasp with each minute closer to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. It’s no wonder Irwin’s taken in by his brother’s big ideas – Gary’s an ex-cop turned successful businessman turned city inspector; when he smiles, the whole world smiles back. But fortune is a fickle mistress. Keen to impress his sons, Irwin takes Scotty and Ben on a late-night field trip, and while attempting to dispense some friendly advice about electrical hazards to the tattooed Russian heavies loading suspicious oil drums into a truck, accidentally attracts the ire of the very Legiimate Businessman™ his brother’s so buddy-buddy with. Their campaign of terror is swift and relentless.

Paper Tiger continues a fraternal line of enquiry first established in Little Odessa and continued across We Own the Night and the co-written Guillame Ganet film Blood Ties. Gray habitually returns to the same broad themes, but articulated with varying rhythms. In Paper Tiger the two brothers are driven apart by the very thing that kept them close to begin with: love for one another. When this threatens to lapse into betrayal, suddenly there’s only one way Gary can see out of their nightmare. The story takes a turn for the Hitchcockian; tension a piano wire threatrning to snap and family loyalty a ticking timebomb. While not as bracingly emotional as previous features like Armageddon Time and The Immigrant, the stoic poetry of Paper Tiger is deeply rewarding, particularly in a pair of sequences (one in the Pearl home, one in a field of tall weeds) that appear as mirror images and rank among the most arresting in Gray’s career. 

While Driver is pure neighbourhood movie star, it’s Teller who gives a transformative performance as the meek and mild Irwin, just trying to do right by his family but instantly in over his head and blustering about it. By contrast Johansson has a certain fussiness as his wife Hester (not aided by a distracting wig) but it’s no fatal flaw. A stealth thriller loaded with the question of what it means to truly sacrifice on a personal and societal level, Paper Tiger might be a jaunt through familiat territory for Gray, but it’s never less compelling for it, a clear-eyed requiem for a sort of humanity that feels it’s slipping through our fingers with each passing year.