For director James Gray P’29, producing an “honest piece of work” requires him to “mine the experiences” of his life. Last Friday, those skills were on full display at an early screening of his new movie “Paper Tiger” hosted by the Ivy Film Festival at the Avon Cinema.
Gray’s latest film fictionalizes his adolescence in a gripping crime drama that is steeped in love and made cavernous by grief.
At the talk, Gray explained that he lets his life experiences inspire his work, a philosophy that he credits to director Francis Ford Coppola, who responded to a fan letter from Gray with the advice to “be personal, because there is only one of you.”
“Paper Tiger” was originally conceived as a loose follow-up to Gray’s 2022 feature “Armageddon Time,” but the angle shifted directions early in the filmmaking process, Gray said. Still, “Paper Tiger” has some of the semi-autobiographical elements of Gray’s previous work, he said. The new film interrogates illusions of the American dream and explores the cost of ambition in 1980s New York City within a humble middle-class landscape.
The feature follows Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller): an engineer who lives a quiet but financially-anxious life with his wife Hester Pearl (Scarlett Johansson) and two teenage sons. One night, Irwin’s brother Gary Pearl (Adam Driver), a former NYPD officer, arrives at Irwin’s house to propose a deal: some Russian businessmen are willing to offer $10,000 for Irwin to consult on their planned clean-up of Gowanus Canal.
Although Irwin is concerned about the Russians’ intentions, the paycheck and his dream of providing an Ivy League education for his sons makes the opportunity impossible to resist. But things soon go awry when Irwin stumbles across the Russians dumping oil into the canal, and he is beaten and extorted by their mafia.
“Paper Tiger” fictionalizes and compresses over a year of Gray’s life into a few weeks, resulting in a film that is both thrilling and slow-burning. This effect is evident from the opening shot, during which the camera pans across an open field of tall grass, with the distant Twin Towers standing like sentries to a faraway land. A plane approaches from somewhere out of shot, its jet engines crescendoing from a faint hum to a thunderous roar. Just when it seems like it can’t get any louder, the scene cuts to a shot of middle-class domesticity.
Gray is known for his elegant and painterly use of color, and “Paper Tiger” does not disappoint. The Pearls’ home is lovingly rendered and brimming with nostalgia. From the warm oranges and yellows that initially tint the house to the ominous pale green that slowly pervades throughout the film, “Paper Tiger” is visually striking in every scene.
In an interview with The Herald, Gray explained that he exclusively used tungsten lights to convey “a warmth and a humanity that LED lights cannot.” This technique is part of Gray’s broader artistic approach, which emphasizes the use of traditional moviemaking technology — including film and vintage lenses — to create “imperfection,” which he says “allows art to breathe.” This also allows Gray to closely imitate the optical qualities of the childhood photographs he draws inspiration from, he said.
The film’s cinematography is matched by Teller and Driver’s moving performances as brothers whose loving relationship is fractured by their anxieties and desperate attempts to protect their family. But it is Johansson’s portrayal of Hester that sits at the emotional center of the film, grounding Gray’s sometimes implausible — but always entertaining — criminal plot in the Pearls’ outer-borough home. Hester’s muted emotional agony as a mother conveys to viewers that “Paper Tiger” is not just a Russian mafia drama but a tragedy about love and the destruction it can cause.
