Neon‘s Paper Tiger is a gritty, sobering, and at times profound crime thriller whose menacing, frightening nature begins to grow until it slowly consumes you. Somber and slow-moving, the film doesn’t just dip its toe into moral ambiguity so much as it takes a cannonball-sized leap into it. This layered film weaves together family, systemic corruption, and the devastating consequences of arrogance and naivety.
You won’t see a car chase in Paper Tiger, and there’s very little violence, but when the film finally delivers it, it makes it count. Visceral and building an incredible tone of overwhelming dread, the film is unflinching, taking a simple story with very little sensationalism and practically surrendering to its own fatalism. It’s a foreordained domino effect of events in which you cannot change the past, the future, or the path chosen for you.
Neon’s Paper Tiger Plot
Paper Tiger goes beyond the typical crime film, which often flounders in surface-level storytelling, and explores deeper truths about human nature, morality, and our fleeting existence that eventually feels like an inescapable destiny.
The story follows Gary Pearl (Star Wars sequel trilogy’s Adam Driver), a former New York City police officer who retired and handed in his badge to start a lucrative security consulting business. Gary drives a luxury automobile. He wears designer suits. And, surprisingly for a movie set in the ’80s, he does not have a raging cocaine problem, despite all the money. Gary also never leaves the house without a service revolver in his holster.
Gary’s sterling reputation helps him secure lucrative contracts from City Hall. This includes a new business opportunity, and he wants his younger brother, Irwin (Miles Teller of Whiplash fame), who is an engineer, to help. Gary has an idea to start a business, with government contracts, of course, to clean up the polluted Gowanus Canal. The former brother in blue is so sure of the prospect that he offers Irwin a $10,000 consulting fee.
Neon’s Paper Tiger Review
Irwin has a wife, Hester (Avengers‘ Scarlett Johansson), and two sons, Ben (Roman Engel) and Scott (Gavin Goudrey), the latter of whom is getting ready to start college. So, he could use the money. He is so excited about the project that he takes his boys on a nighttime assessment, arriving at the Russian shipyard located in Brooklyn. Seeing a potential hazard, he tells his kids to stay in the car and witnesses something that endangers their lives.
Paper Tiger is from director James Gray, known for subdued crime films such as The Yards, Armageddon Time, and the criminally undervalued We Own the Night. Gray also wrote the script, which echoes incidents from his own life. Gray’s work has always been autobiographical, with the aforementioned films echoing incidents involving his family’s legal troubles and the racial divisions he grew up with in Flushing, Queens, New York.
Like most filmmakers, Gray uses the silver screen as a way to tell stories he knows and understands. Here, Teller’s Irwin reflects his family’s corruption case, while in another subplot that serves as a powerful case of misdirection, Johansson’s Hester deals with a mysterious illness. Gray’s script, like most of his, often explores life’s cruel, inexorable momentum.
Is Neon’s Paper Tiger Worth Watching?
Like those films, Paper Tiger has a literary weight. The actions are thoughtful, the imagery, including the extraordinary framing and chiaroscuro lighting, is expressive, and the thematic depth is eloquent, all within an unforgiving and brutal world. Maybe no other image sums up the sentiment with such effective use of the cornfield since Field of Dreams, with haunting visual grandeur that makes it one of the year’s best.
While Teller and Johansson obviously give strong performances, Driver’s Gary Pearl is an absolute knockout and one of the year’s best. Driver portrays not only a man whose confidence is a fatal flaw, but also one whose hubris and self-righteousness quickly line the world up against him. Visceral and unflinching, this is one of the year’s very best performances.
Driver’s portroyal helps James Gray’s hauntingly fatalistic Paper Tiger prove that tragedy doesn’t care whether you’re right or wrong. It only cares that you’re standing in its way.
Neon’s Paper Tiger opens in limited theaters on November 13 and expands nationwide on November 20th!
Visceral and unflinching, Adam Driver delivers one of the year's very best performances in James Gray's hauntingly fatalistic Paper Tiger, a film that proves tragedy doesn't care whether you are right or wrong. It only cares if you are standing in its way.
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I am a film and television critic and a proud member of the Las Vegas Film Critic Society, Critics Choice Association, and a 🍅 Rotten Tomatoes/Tomato meter approved. However, I still put on my pants one leg at a time, and that’s when I often stumble over. When I’m not writing about movies, I patiently wait for the next Pearl Jam album and pass the time by scratching my wife’s back on Sunday afternoons while she watches endless reruns of California Dreams. I was proclaimed the smartest reviewer alive by actor Jason Isaacs, but I chose to ignore his obvious sarcasm. You can also find my work on InSession Film, Ready Steady Cut, Hidden Remote, Music City Drive-In, Nerd Alert, and Film Focus Online.