Movie Review: James Gray delivers a milestone crime drama in ‘Paper Tiger’

The American Dream has seldom looked so bleak as in “Paper Tiger,” James Gray’s beautifully punishing tragedy about a middle class family in Queens. With operatic grace and 35 mm grit, “Paper Tiger” shrewdly and authentically explores ideas about wealth, worth, the cost of family and the price of wanting more.

In 1986 New York, Wall Street might be booming in its “greed is good” era, but across the East River — where the grass still grows tall and the twin towers look small and distant on the skyline — Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) is up early making storm windows for the winter. This is being done very much against the wishes of one of his teenage sons, who is trying to sleep in. Winter is three months away anyway, he complains.

Irwin is an ordinary dad, kind and a little goofy, resplendent in a constant stream of neatly but not stylishly tucked-in plaid shirts and windbreakers. He seems older than his years, though he’s probably barely 40. Part of that might be due to the choices Teller has made for his voice and accent, sounding a little like Peter Falk in “The Princess Bride,” but it’s also spiritually true that every generation gets to believe that all the ones prior were always “old.”

Irwin is married to Hester ( Scarlett Johansson ), a practical but spirited woman who has started to fantasize about life in the suburbs. They live in a modest house where you can practically feel the texture of real life. It's a home of laughter, love and schoolwork — both parents dream of their boys going to Ivy League schools and doing better than they did. The boys also have their eyes on a fancier life, whining, “Why do we always have to buy crappy stuff and live crappy?”

They wouldn’t be the first ungrateful teens who fail to recognize just how good they have it. But they get glimpses of the rich life in their uncle Gary (Adam Driver), a former police officer who now does quite well as a security consultant. He has the suit and car, and the grand gestures he makes seem casual. When we meet him, he’s dropped by Irwin and Hester’s with a steak dinner for five from “Luger's.”

Gary proposes an idea to his brother, an engineer with a specialty in risk assessment: There’s a project in the works to clean up the Gowanus Canal, and they might be able to help. The businesses, once controlled by the mafia, are being taken over by Russian immigrants. Gary has spotted an opportunity to help them navigate the ins and outs of regulations.

The offer of a windfall comes as a relief for Irwin, stressed by the looming cost of college for two kids. Gary, too, is going through an expensive divorce. Irwin wonders if there is something shady beneath it all, but Gary reminds him that “we’ve never played in the dirt.” Still, there’s a foreboding feeling that this is not going to be as simple, clean and easy as Gary is promising. The movie, after all, began with a quote from Aeschylus: “Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further.”

It’s only a matter of time before things start going very wrong: One night, Irwin takes his boys out for a “nighttime risk assessment,” and they soon find themselves swarmed by paranoid Russian goons with guns.

Gray, who finds new notes in a genre he’s already put his mark on with films like “Little Odessa,” “The Yards” and “We Own the Night,” is masterful at slowly, methodically building tension and dread to an almost unbearable crescendo. The decisions these brothers make, first together, then separately, take on the grandeur and weight of a classic tragedy.

Hester, meanwhile, becomes a physical manifestation of the polluted canal as she endures her own secret health crisis. Like many mothers before and after her, she feels it is her duty to bear the weight of a death sentence in private. There are louder, uglier, bigger things happening all around and she doesn’t want to worry anyone. It’s a beautiful performance from an actor who often gets lost in franchise and spectacle.

But it’s Driver who really steals the show as a man doomed by the responsibility he feels for his brother. Beneath Gary's easy smile, charm and flash festers a different kind of heartbreak and loneliness. He can also be shockingly violent. And, when it comes down to it, the brotherly loyalty and desire to protect at any cost might only go one way.

It builds to one of the more thrilling and inventive showdowns in recent film history — a rare movie that embraces, rather than tries to disguise, the omnipresent sound of planes taking off and landing at a nearby airport.

The whole grimy affair is agonizing, as everyone tries in vain to do the right thing. The morbid joke is that it was rigged from the beginning — not just the job, but the entire system, the false promises of capitalism, the ways in which corruption is enabled, and the paradox of honest wealth.

“Paper Tiger” may be set 40 years ago, but in the most fundamental way, it’s not a movie about our past.

“Paper Tiger,” a Neon release in select theaters Friday and nationwide on Nov. 20, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language and some violence.” Running time: 115 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.