Review: James Gray's Paper Tiger is haunting for the way it pits loyalty and duty against ambition and desperation

Filmmaker James Gray has two predominant interests, crime dramas and his New York childhood, and in Paper Tiger, he combines them in a semi-autobiographical crime drama. Miles Teller stars as Irwin Pearl, a family man and engineer who tells dad jokes and just wants to make his family proud of him. Adam Driver stars as Gary, Irwin’s more successful and flashier brother, who throws around cash and drives a Mercedes. Irwin and Gary are a study in contrasts, as Irwin is the educated one who is yet stuck in a lower-middle class malaise, and Gary is a morally dubious former cop who leverages his connections for a security business.

When Gary proposes he and Irwin go into business as environmental cleanup consultants—Brooklyn’s disgusting Gowanus Canal is scheduled to be cleaned up, a real world event that helped lead to the gentrification of Brooklyn at the turn of millennium—and maybe the business would have been legitimate had Irwin not taken his teenaged sons, Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel), to the canal at night, where they witness the Russian mob moving illegal contraband. As the Italian mafia is being moved out of Brooklyn by RICO cases, the Bratva is moving in, but Irwin is kind of a dumbass and steps directly into illegal business as he takes the Russian businessmen at face value.

This brings the Russians down on his family, who threaten and terrorize them while Gary tries to find a solution for everyone. Caught in the middle is Irwin’s wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson, using the same New Yawk accent she uses on SNL, which is a little disconcerting at first), who warned against hauling their sons to Brooklyn on a school night. Hester is quietly devastating, smarter than her husband but just the right age to be marginalized by the last vestiges of the “father knows best” generation and also dealing with a diagnosis that will change the shape of her family forever, beyond even the trouble Irwin brought to their door. This is one of Johansson’s finest performances, a reminder that she is as good of a character actress as she is a leading lady.

Teller and Driver are also excellent, believably brothers with a lifetime of love and resentment between them. James Gray, who writes and directs the film, knows how to present family drama without histrionics, and it just takes small gestures and subtle vocal inflections to read the whole history of the Pearl brothers in their first interactions. There is a version of Paper Tiger that goes bigger, showier, more Hollywood, but Gray keeps his film within plausible bounds.

It also just looks like a film. Shot on 35mm by cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay, Paper Tiger has warmth and depth and grain and isn’t a flat gray nightmare to look at. It looks authentically of the era in which it is set, as if Scorsese concerned himself less with the mafiosos and more with the average people eking out a living in the margins of the world they control. It’s a story that touches on big happenings in the world but is concerned with everyday life and the machinations of people just trying to get by.

James Gray has been telling crime stories since 1994’s Little Odessa, and this is his first film since that one that so perfectly blends family and the dynamics of obligation and betrayal introduced by organized crime. Paper Tiger is not a loud film, but it is haunting for the way it pits loyalty and duty against ambition and desperation. No one makes great decisions, and everyone is just doing their best. Families are not impenetrable fortresses but delicate organisms that can be sundered by their own folly. James Gray has a lot of compassion for the fictional version of his family but is unrelentingly frank about the ways in which chasing the American dream forces people into increasingly desperate situations. Paper Tiger is about the Irwins, but also anyone who reached for more and found the dream was no more than dust in their hands.

Paper Tiger is now playing in select theaters and will expand on November 20, 2026.