James Gray’s Paper Tiger is Brilliantly Murky

James Gray’s 2007 underworld drama We Own the Night closes on a whispered affirmation of solidarity between siblings. The brothers, who have survived a series of clashes with…

James Gray’s 2007 underworld drama We Own the Night closes on a whispered affirmation of solidarity between siblings. The brothers, who have survived a series of clashes with the Russian mob, pledge their devotion to each other, in a moment of profound connection and of desolation. At the end of a story defined by loss, they have each other’s backs and nothing else.

The enveloping bonds of brotherly love—and how swiftly they can tighten, in spite of themselves, into a straitjacket, or a noose—are the subject of Gray’s new thriller, Paper Tiger. The picture, which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, is suffused with an emotional heat that can’t quite thaw its icy bleakness.

The balance of palpable warmth and scarifying chill makes it Gray’s most effective and affecting feature since We Own the Night, which it resembles both as a gritty period piece set in 1980s Queens and as an anxious, ambivalent meditation on masculinity. “Let there be wealth without tears,” reads an opening epigram, attributed to Aeschylus. The near impossibility of pursuing the former without the latter provides the catalyst for a carefully measured domestic tragedy.

“Everybody up here was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, or stole one. That’s not us,” notes a character early on in Paper Tiger, referring slyly to the pretensions of the Long Island suburbs. The line is delivered with just a hint of foreboding, in the midst of a family confab around a pool.

It’s Labor Day weekend, and the assembled gaggle is enjoying one final summer idyll, before grown-ups and children alike have to get back to the grind—or, in the case of Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller), look for a way to leave it behind forever. As Paper Tiger opens, Irwin is without tears, though he has plenty of troubles.