From the start, foreboding envelops James Gray’s “Paper Tiger” like a thick, dangerous fog. As a filmmaker, Gray likes hanging out in the dark, especially in those shadowy corners where everything is obscured, including relationships. Like some of his influences, he has an affinity for intimate crime stories that speak to larger truths, like his 1995 feature debut “Little Odessa,” set in a darkly cloistered immigrant world of predators and prey. Whatever the grift or the stakes, though, Gray’s crime movies are often also family melodramas in which the ties that bind — including to the American dream — sometimes throttle.
“Paper Tiger” opens on a sweeping view of New York in 1986 and, like several other of Gray’s movies, narrows in on two brothers, the Pearls. The eldest, Gary (Adam Driver), is a retired New York police officer who has since made bank as a security consultant. He’s got swagger and flash, a Mercedes and hair as slick as his man-about-town glad-handing. Physically imposing, he walks and talks like a guy who rarely lets anything or anyone get in his way, and is accustomed to basking in the glow of other people’s admiration. When he visits the home of his younger brother, Irwin (Miles Teller), Gary doesn’t walk into the house. He storms it.
Gray sets the tone quickly and efficiently, dropping you into a richly textured, immediately convincing world of real people living in real places. When Gary swans into Irwin’s modest home in Queens, wowing his brother’s family with a steak dinner, you see both the love and the small, cramped lives. As Irwin and his wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), bustle about helping with the meal, Gary chats up their sons, the teenage Scott (Gavin Goudey) and younger Benjamin (Roman Engel). Gary also thrills the kids by flashing his gun, a portentously freighted piece that he wears tucked in an ankle holster. Not long after, he is dazzling Irwin, too, with a business proposition that sounds, and proves, as risky as the gun.
