Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller Deliver a Tender Thriller in Paper Tiger

Some thrillers are enjoyable enough, and suspenseful enough, while you’re watching them, and vaporize the instant the credits roll. But there’s another, much rarer kind of thriller: one that follows you home, giving you the feeling you’re being shadowed by a thief, someone or something who stirs in you a fear of loss that wasn’t there before.

Writer-director James Gray’s Paper Tiger—playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival—is that second kind, though to even classify it as a thriller risks putting it in a rigid box that can’t hold its complex contours. It’s about a family, a group of people who don’t know how happy they are until suddenly they aren’t. It’s about brothers who both resent and look after one another, the Janus head paradox that rules so many sibling relationships, often intensifying loyalty rather than weakening it. It’s about the loneliness of being a parent, in moments when you can’t protect your children or, perhaps worse, when you’re so intent on protecting them that you find yourself on an island of isolation, overwhelmed by your own fears but unable to express them. In places, this picture is wrenchingly tense, as if Gray were discovering a gift he didn’t know he had, playing on the audience’s nerves the way you’d gently tighten the pegs on a violin. Paper Tiger is old school in the best way, the kind of movie so many American directors have forgotten how to make, if they ever learned in the first place.

Set in 1986 Queens, Paper Tiger opens on what is simultaneously the saddest and most jubilant holiday of the American year, Labor Day Weekend: The kids are bummed about going back to school. The parents are happy for the same reason. Mom and dad Hester and Irwin Pearl, played by Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, are getting ready to ease their two sons, 17-year-old Scott and young teenager Benjamin (Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel), into the new school year when Irwin gets a call from his older brother whom, it seems, he doesn’t hear from often. Gary (Adam Driver), a retired cop who’s made good money for himself since he left the force, is going through a messy divorce and needs extra dough, fast. He has an idea for a consulting business and wants to get Irwin, an engineer, in on the action. Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, long a disaster of sludge and sewage, is ripe for renewal and development, and groups of Russian businessmen—if you want to call them that—are moving in to take advantage. Gary explains that they’re clueless about regulations, the ins and outs of doing business in the States. Gary and Irwin can advise them, and it doesn't matter whether they listen or not. As Gary presents it, it sounds like easy money. Irwin is in.

The brothers’ personalities are distinctive from the start. When Gary invites himself to Irwin’s house for dinner to talk business, at least he brings the dinner: it’s a meal for the whole family from Peter Luger’s Steakhouse, ferried in with a flourish by actual waiters from the restaurant. Gary is freewheeling, glamorous, a little mysterious, and Scott and Benjamin adore him: He performs card tricks at the table—you get the sense his knack for sleight of hand extends to his business dealings. When the boys ask, he shows them the gun he wears under his pants leg, strapped into a garter holster. Irwin, meanwhile, is a windbreaker dad, a guy who putters around the yard doing what needs to be done, earnest about supporting his family but also a little clueless about the larger world. The first meeting he and Gary have with the Brooklyn Russians doesn’t seem to faze him, even though it’s presided over by a shady mobster lackey and takes place in a paneled trailer with a tacky stuffed marlin mounted on the wall. He steps out to survey the canal, and we see it through his eyes: the layer of shimmery gunk atop the water makes it look almost magical. (The cinematographer here is Joaquín Baca-Asay, and he and Gray shot the picture on film—it has a gently scuffed, lived-in look.)

Even though the Pearls' modest Queens house is certainly comfortable enough, Irwin is dizzy with the possibility of making better money for his family, and he’s eager to start this new gig. One schoolnight, despite Hester’s protestations, he piles the boys into the car drives them out to Gowanus to scope out the scene of his new business venture. His good intentions trigger an incident that terrifies his kids and makes him realize, finally, how dangerous his new associates really are. Almost simultaneously, Hester is hit with new anxieties too: while driving the kids to school, she veers off the road and hits a tree with the family car—something is off with her vision, though she tries to hide it from Irwin and the boys. Gary is the only one who keeps swaggering through life, confident he can sidestep any problem or talk his way out of any misunderstanding. He’s got a distinctly masculine kind of breeziness, and Irwin envies it.

Irwin’s bad judgment, Gary’s overconfidence, Hester’s realization that just about the only thing that matters to her, caring for her family, may be in jeopardy: suddenly, seemingly small things, quirks or character traits people live with and work around every day, have become seeds of tragedy for this small, tight group. Paper Tiger is a picture about everyday things, about what you can lose in a heartbeat if you’re not careful, or even just unlucky. It’s a thriller filled with tenderness, the kind you can make only when you’ve got performers who know what they’re doing: Teller plays Irwin’s naivete not as a pitiable state but merely a deeply unfortunate one; even so, it becomes a cause of shame for him, a burden almost too great to bear. Johansson is superb here. A brief scene in which she pictures an unimaginable future for her family is so compact and potent that it becomes a quiet anchor for the movie. And for Driver’s Gary, everything is an outsized gesture. He swings his long limbs freely just because they’re there. He’s been blessed; he’s the can-do guy who can do anything. When he realizes he can’t, the molten despair in his eyes is nearly unbearable.