There’s a rot in the foundation of the American Dream in James Gray’s very good “Paper Tiger,” a return to familiar territory that echoes his early films like “The Yards” and “We Own the Night” but with an even stronger current of doomed melancholy. The waters that flow through this section of 1986 New York are quite literally polluted, and the corruption that’s working its way downstream is washing average families away in its sludge.
From the minute that Gary Pearl (Adam Driver) shows up at his brother Irwin’s (Miles Teller) home in the first scene of “Paper Tiger,” we know things aren’t going to end well. Driver gives Gary a sense of dangerous confidence, the kind of classic movie character who overestimates his skill to get out of a deadly situation and underestimates his enemy’s determination to trap him. However, Driver refuses to lean into what could have been the exaggerated hyperactivity of this character, finding the truth in it instead of the clichéd fidgety nature that often typifies this role. He’s a problem solver faced with a gigantic problem.
It starts when Gary suggests that Alan come aboard a new construction consulting firm this ex-cop is starting. New work along the Gowanus Canal has led to a sort of Wild West approach to regulations, and Gary wants to bring the levelheaded Alan on to consult with companies who want to avoid the authorities, either by doing things legally, or just hiding them the right way. He warns him that they’re walking into the criminal underworld and they need to step lightly as they do. Let the street-smart Gary do the talking; he knows how to deal with these people.
After a consultation goes so well that Alan comes home with $10k in his pocket, he makes the mistake of bringing his two sons down to the worksite at night, noticing that an excavator is in a position that could get his new clients in trouble. When he walks into something clearly illegal, he pushes the domino on a sequence of events that can only lead to tragedy. Before you know it, Alan’s entire family is being threatened, including wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson).
Not only have we seen films like this before, but from Gray himself, so instead of operating as a straightforward thriller, “Paper Tiger” feels more like a study in inevitable destruction. As Gary tries to save his brother, he gets sucked deeper into the sludge himself. We know at least one of these brothers isn’t going to make it out of this alive; the only questions are who and how.
Gray directs Driver and Teller to two of the best performances of their individual careers. Driver gets the showier role: the kind of guy who brings caterers carrying Peter Luger’s over to his brother’s house and doesn’t hesitate to let his nephews see the gun he carries in his sock. And yet it’s more subtle than it sounds as Driver injects increasingly louder notes of despair into the bravado.
Teller gets the part Keitel might have played in the ‘80s: a more subdued family man who is willing to fight for his loved ones but might not know the rules of the brawl. Johansson’s work has been as divisive as any performance at Cannes this year with some saying it’s among her best and some calling it an embarrassment. (I’ve seen both Oscar and Razzie predictions.) I’m more in the middle, but where you land may come down to your tolerance for big wigs and accents.
Other than Driver’s work, what strikes me the most about “Paper Tiger” is the robust filmmaking. Gray reunites with Joaquin Baca-Asay to give the film a tight, sweaty visual language, full of fretful close-ups when it needs to be but also so confidently blocked in the wide shots. There’s a sequence in the climax of the film along a roadside that is an all-timer, perfectly directed, shot, and edited in a way that makes it feel like the closing scene of a classic noir.
I also think there’s a richer subtext to “Paper Tiger” than its simple narrative might have its critics believe. Once again, it feels like a personal film for Gray, going back exactly four decades to a time when the potential of the American Dream could be destroyed by a man trying to do the right thing. It’s an old-fashioned tale of a good man decimated by two twists of fate: a night visit to a job and a diagnosis involving his wife over which he had even less control. In that sense, it’s about how we can do our best to work and strive and plan, only for it all to come apart like tissue paper.
The biggest disappointment of the early part of Cannes this year has to be Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Sheep in the Box,” a film that fits snugly into this masterful filmmaker’s history of tales of unusual families but does so in a way that’s almost aggressively inert, so drained of emotion that it collapses when it tries to be heartfelt in its syrupy final act. It’s as if Kore-eda looked at the criticisms of Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” and tried so hard to avoid sentimentality that he drained his project of all of its heart and blood. This is an oppressively sterile piece of filmmaking, one that’s so determined not to be melodramatic that it forgets to be anything at all.
Kensuke (Daigo) and Otone (Haruka Ayase) are still deep in the grieving process of the death of their young son when she receives an outreach from a company called ReBirth. They offer an incredible product for people not ready to say goodbye: An android version of their child. In this “Black Mirror”-esque concept, the new Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) has been programmed with many of the interests of the original (especially trains, a Kore-eda motif) but he also has a few technical requirements like not being able to go far from mom and dad, and needing charging by sitting on a chair. He also doesn’t need to eat and can’t get wet. Yes, it sounds slightly terrifying, and Kensuke is admittedly reticent (he calls it a Roomba), but it feels like Otone needs this. It’s not forever; maybe it’s just a chance to say goodbye.
Kore-eda has been making films about unusual families for most of his career from the abandoned children of “Nobody Knows” to the outsiders of “Shoplifters” and “Broker.” So it makes sense that this concept would appeal to him: Can a broken family be repaired by technology? The problem is that he seems unwilling to really grapple with the ideas at the center of this drama. He’s such a deeply humanist filmmaker that he finds nice beats with his performers, especially Ayase, but it feels almost like he was hoping the story would find philosophical registers organically that it just never does.
By the time that Kore-eda decides he needs to turn up the saccharine score in his multiple endings to try to provoke an emotional response, “Sheep in the Box” has totally lost its meaning. It’s not really a cautionary tale about trying to stall the natural progression of grief as much as a half-baked thought experiment. There needs to be more blood flowing under the surface of a film about grieving parents getting to spend time with their dead child again. It may be intentional given the subject matter, but this movie has no soul.
