New York Crime Drama ‘Paper Tiger’ Fails To Cut Deep

There is a great movie to be made about the bad boy of Brooklyn: the Gowanus Canal. It could be a hard-punching documentary, revealing who has benefited from the $2 billion-plus cleanup of the 1.8-mile waterway, dug out of oyster-rich marshes in the 1860s to become the busiest commercial canal in America. It could be a musical comedy about a love affair between a barge captain and the head of the EPA, built around the real-life farce of the cleanup. The agency designated the canal a Superfund site in 2010 and approved a dredging plan three years later. In 2021, the Weeks 71, laden with more than 1,000 tons of dredged sludge, partially sank at its mooring at Bay Ridge Flats. The lovers would, of course, go down with the ship.Instead, we have a crime thriller like “Paper Tiger.” It is set in 1986, when a cleanup of the canal promises easy money for two brothers: Gary (Adam Driver), a former cop turned lucrative security consultant, and mild-mannered Irwin (Miles Teller), an environmental engineer. They go into business with the Russian mobsters who control the canal. But when Irwin takes his two bratty teenage sons on a nighttime site visit, he sees something he shouldn’t, and the Russians retaliate with violence and extortion. Gary assures Irwin that the gangsters are no real threat — the paper tiger of the title — but is proved wrong when they invade the Queens home Irwin shares with his wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson).The writer and director is James Gray, a New York native, who disclosed at a BAFTA screening I attended: “I had a reasonably miserable childhood. This movie took shape when my father abandoned me in a car and we were held up at knife point.” Mr. Gray calls the film “90% autobiography.” It draws on his late teens, when his brother left home, his mother died of brain cancer, and his father faced prison in a corruption scandal.The film was conceived as a follow-up to the superb “Armageddon Time” (2022), also set in Queens, in 1980. But that film’s leads, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway, pulled out, citing scheduling conflicts. That might have been the first red flag.Mr. Gray has called “Paper Tiger” a love letter to his parents. It is also a hatchet job on the Russians, whom he blames for sabotaging the American Dream. “I went to the Soviet Union on a school trip in 1984,” he said. “It was very dystopian, weird, wretched. Orwell nailed it.” The movie portrays the moment when “the market became God,” thanks to “a tidal wave” of violent Russian immigrants who “see enemies in their soup.” Their portrayal feels dated and stereotypical, evoking European Bond villains like Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin in 1985’s “A View to a Kill.”Alas, Mr. Gray does not go deeper into the world of the Russian mafia, as David Cronenberg did in “Eastern Promises” (2007). And his portrait of 1986 New York — “a city going nuts,” he called it — is superficial, with none of the themes of racism and anti-Semitism that made “Armageddon Time” so effective. That year was indeed the start of a fascinating era, taking in crack, AIDS, Ed Koch’s decline, and Donald Trump’s rise, all better chronicled in Jonathan Mahler’s book “The Gods of New York” (2025).Mr. Gray has been described as the last American director in the 1970s New Hollywood tradition of Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and early Martin Scorsese: adult genre films, operatic family drama, memorably drawn characters. But “Paper Tiger” is no “Mean Streets.” That’s largely because the script is full of unconvincing plot points. Why would the Russians beat up Irwin and traumatize his children at knife point just for warning them of a health and safety issue? How could they break into his home at night and take noisy Polaroid photos of his wife and kids without waking them? Maybe he deserves a pass on these missteps, since he is trying to be loyal to real, 40-year-old memories.Less forgivable is dialogue in which characters constantly say exactly what they are thinking, and a harp-and-violin-heavy score that bangs us over the head with how we are meant to feel. Mr. Gray says he was channeling Hitchcock to build tension but, apart from one shot of a silhouetted rifle barrel in the home-invasion scene, I never felt the ghost of the master of suspense.One car chase is truly embarrassing. Gary eludes his Russian pursuers by veering off the New Jersey Turnpike, then inexplicably parks in plain sight, ambles out of the car and wanders into a field of tall reeds until, at last, a dark car crawls around a corner and finds him. The ensuing showdown takes place in perhaps the most clichéd location in all crime drama: the Meadowlands, whose feathery phragmites Tony Soprano drove past in the opening credits of “The Sopranos” and where, legend had it, Jimmy Hoffa lay buried beneath the old Giants StadiumWhy, when the main action is in Queens and Gowanus, are we even in New Jersey? Presumably because Mr. Gray shot much of the film there. New Jersey even stands in for the Gowanus Canal since, as he said, the real one “looks nothing like it did in 1986.” There is not one shot of the real canal, and the substitutes give no sense of what a cesspool it was, with no visual evocation of this open sewer’s rank stench.This is partly because of the super-grainy 35-millimeter film chosen by Mr. Gray and his cinematographer, Joaquín Baca-Asay. As with the recently-released “Wild Horse Nine,” I found myself yearning for VistaVision — in which Paul Thomas Anderson shot “One Battle After Another” (2025) — or even Imax, which Christopher Nolan used for “The Odyssey” (2026). Mr. Baca-Asay said they were “going for a yellowing, faded look … to make it look like it was made [in 1986] and then rediscovered.” Mr. Gray added: “The analog thing is not an object of fetish. It is the conveying of humanity, because we are imperfect creatures.” What he wanted was “the softness of the skin, the skin that glows, what we used to call the magic of the silver screen.”While I was not persuaded that this eloquent theory played out in practice, I did take some pleasure in the film’s 1980s nostalgia, especially in Happy Massee’s impeccable production design, which excavates such wonderful artifacts as rotary phones, digital watches, the Yellow Pages — and Culture Club. Brighton Beach also gets another moment in the spotlight, as it did in Mr. Gray’s first feature, “Little Odessa” (1994).Scarlett Johansson in ‘Paper Tiger.’ Courtesy of NeonAs for the cast, Mr. Driver is being pushed for a best supporting actor Oscar. Mr. Gray says he wrote the part for him, as a composite of his real uncle and one of his father’s business partners. Mr. Driver delivers a good deal of menace, charm and candor, and the good news is that he is not as bad as he was in Francis Ford Coppola’s disastrous “Megalopolis” (2024). But he is nowhere near as good as in Noah Baumbach’s divorce drama “Marriage Story” (2019), in which he and Ms. Johansson had amazing chemistry. Bizarrely, Mr. Gray gives them not one substantial scene together. That might have lifted her performance, which is hampered by a distracting poodle-permed wig, a labored Queens accent she seems to have learned from Fran Drescher, and a tendency to melodrama that reportedly had the Cannes premiere audience laughing in the wrong places.Intentional comedy is almost entirely absent from the film. A few laughs could have saved it, and the Gowanus setting offered fertile ground for sludge-black humor. After all, I own a T-shirt that proclaims, “Gowanus Canal Swim Team.” The only time I laughed in the film was when Hester’s mother tries to lure the couple to Great Neck, and Irwin retorts: “Everyone here was born with a silver spoon in their mouth — or stole one!”The movie is also an erotic non-starter. There is not even a kiss. Mr. Driver never unbuttons his tailored shirt, and Ms. Johansson — surely one of the most beautiful women in the world — has never looked frumpier.Mr. Gray may argue that he is trying to touch other emotional chords. Indeed, he views the film as a Greek tragedy set in Queens, and it opens with an epigraph from Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon”: “Let there be wealth without tears; enough for the wise man who will ask no further.” But he delivers no agonizing catharsis, and a subplot in which Hester discovers she has a terminal illness feels like a drowning writer’s desperate cry for help. This lack of emotional connection makes the film’s 115 minutes feel interminable, and contrasts starkly with “Armageddon Time,” where Anthony Hopkins’s grandfather provided an anchor of love and empathy.Mr. Gray also claims deep political relevance for the film, suggesting that Russian strongman capitalism has contaminated the American Dream. “We live in a vicious world,” he told the BAFTA audience, calling the current president “the absolutely perfect person for our time, because he tells you that everything is up for grabs if a dollar is involved.”Perhaps. But the great Gowanus Canal movie has yet to be made. Like the Weeks 71, this one sinks before it leaves the bay.

New York Crime Drama ‘Paper Tiger’ Fails To Cut Deep

New York Crime Drama ‘Paper Tiger’ Fails To Cut Deep

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