I have one mild beef with James Gray‘s Paper Tiger, which I caught last night at 10 pm.
I felt completely throttled by Gray’s partly fact-based, family-history street drama, which isn’t so much a Queens-and-Brooklyn crime thriller as a middle-class film noir tragedy.
Like Gray’s Armageddon Time, Paper Tiger is set in suburban Queens, where Gray was raised in the ’70s and ’80s, and in Russian-mob-infiltrated Brooklyn and especially featuring the super-polluted Gowanus Canal, which I’d never even heard of until last night. (I’d now like to forget it.)
Set during the mid to late ’80s, it’s basically a “don’t fuck with the Russian mob psychos” deal, as well as a “life can be horrifically unfair” thing as well as a boilerplate serving of turbulent brotherly conflict.
The main characters are Gary Pearl (Adam Driver), a somewhat flamboyant ex-cop and flashy opportunist, and his younger brother Irwin (Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller), an upstanding, straight-arrow reservoir engineer who’s a father of two teenage boys, Scott and Ben, and a dutiful husband of Hester (Scarlett Johansson).
There’s a third-act action sequence that I’ll never forget, set within what initially looks like a dense, elephant’s-eye cornfield straight out of Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma!, but instead of Gordon Macrae singing “oh, what beautiful morning” you’ve got a key protagonist along with four or five Russian goons tramping through the weeds, all with guns drawn.
Paper Tiger, as noted, is not an action-and-suspense thriller per se, but a riveting gloom-and-doomer. It’s a stunningly somber arthouse thing. I was reminded at times of Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. I’m telling myself that it’s Gray’s most jarring and absorbing film ever. It leaves you with a “whoa” feeling…a real bent-over, stomach-punch sense of shock.
My beef is something that I can’t make especially clear as I don’t want to spoil.
It basically comes down to the dramatic rendering of justice, which is a basic audience requirement in a drama. Joe and Jane Popcorn don’t necessarily need a happy ending, but they will defintely feel thrown if a major character — good or bad, noble or cowardly, gentle or cruel — doesn’t meet with some form of appropriate Biblical response.
Put another way, malevolent criminal characters (bullies, murderers, cruel dads, crime family bosses) who cause terrible things to happen to a film’s mostly sympathetic protagonist[s] need to be disciplined at the very least, or, more preferably, suffer some kind of eye-for-an-eye slapdown. I’m not saying that a major shithead character in Paper Tiger evades God’s terrible swift sword but…okay, I actually am saying that. And it’s still bothering me.
How would you have felt after seeing The Godfather, Part II…how would you have felt if Lee Strasberg‘s Hyman Roth had just walked away at the finale with a fresh slice of birthday cake?