Paper Tiger Review: Adam Driver Leads James Gray’s Dark Family Tragedy

James Gray’s Paper Tiger begins in Queens in the summer of 1986, at a moment when the American dream still looks attainable — at least from a distance.

Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) is an engineer with a wife, two teenage sons and a reasonably comfortable life. He has a home, a family and a stable career. But he also has an older brother who seems to have everything he doesn’t: money, confidence, connections and the kind of lifestyle that makes Irwin’s own achievements feel increasingly insignificant.

Gary Pearl (Adam Driver) is a former police officer who has reinvented himself as a wealthy businessman. He arrives in a blue Mercedes, carrying an expensive dinner from Peter Luger’s, a gun strapped to his ankle and the effortless swagger of someone who has already convinced himself that he has made it.

For Irwin, the timing is dangerous.

His family is beginning to expect more. His mother-in-law wants them to move to Great Neck. His older son wants an expensive 18th birthday party. His wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) wants a more secure and comfortable life. And Gary’s sudden return offers Irwin something that his ordinary career cannot: a shortcut.

That shortcut leads directly into the Russian mob.

James Gray has spent much of his career examining families caught between loyalty, ambition and self-destruction. Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night and Armageddon Time all approach those ideas from different angles, but Paper Tiger may be his most concentrated exploration of them.

The film is ostensibly a crime thriller. At its center, however, is a much smaller and more painful story about two brothers who have never quite figured out how to live with each other.

A family story disguised as a crime thriller

Gary recruits Irwin for a business project involving the Gowanus Canal. He needs an engineer who can help with the technical side of the operation, and Irwin initially sees nothing particularly suspicious about the offer.

Gary conveniently leaves out one important detail: the project is connected to the Russian mob.

Irwin is not a criminal and has no experience navigating that world. But he approaches the job with the same seriousness he would bring to any engineering project. That becomes a problem when he takes his sons to inspect the canal and they witness the Russians illegally dumping waste into the water.

Suddenly, the Pearls are no longer simply doing business with dangerous people. They have become a liability.

What follows is a steadily tightening spiral of threats, violence and bad decisions. Gary is given a limited amount of time to solve the problem, while Irwin and his sons find themselves dangerously close to a conflict they were never equipped to understand.

Gray deliberately keeps the crime story relatively straightforward. The Russian mob is dangerous, Gary has made promises he cannot keep, and Irwin has wandered into a world far beyond his control.

The interesting part is why Irwin keeps going.

The answer is his family — and, increasingly, his desire to prove that he can provide something better for them.

Adam Driver gives the film its emotional center

Adam Driver is outstanding as Gary.

The character could easily have become a familiar archetype: the flashy older brother who made money through questionable means and enjoys reminding everyone around him of his success. Driver gives Gary considerably more depth.

Gary genuinely loves his brother. He also needs him. Those two things are never completely separable.

That ambiguity is what makes the relationship work. Gary's offer is simultaneously an act of affection, a business opportunity and a form of manipulation. He wants to help Irwin, but he also wants something from him. The film never needs to reduce that contradiction to a simple answer.

Driver moves between Gary's charm and menace almost effortlessly. One scene presents him as the entertaining older brother who has suddenly returned with expensive food and stories from his glamorous new life. The next reminds us that this is a man carrying a gun and dealing with people who are capable of extreme violence.

It is one of Driver's most controlled performances, precisely because Gary rarely announces what he is feeling.

Miles Teller provides an effective counterpoint. Irwin is not a natural criminal or an ambitious gangster waiting for his opportunity. He is an ordinary man who becomes increasingly obsessed with the possibility that ordinary is no longer enough.

That makes his downfall more painful.

Scarlett Johansson finds the quiet tragedy

Scarlett Johansson's Hester has less control over the events around her than either of the brothers, but Gray gives her storyline its own weight.

Irwin keeps information from her because he believes he is protecting his family. Hester begins doing the same thing for similar reasons. The result is a household in which everyone is trying to protect everyone else while simultaneously making the situation worse.

Johansson avoids turning Hester into a stereotypical suburban wife from a period drama. Her performance becomes progressively more withdrawn as the consequences of Irwin's decisions accumulate.

The family's problems are no longer simply financial. Trust begins to disappear.

That is where Paper Tiger becomes more interesting than a conventional crime thriller.

James Gray's 1980s New York

The film's setting is another major strength.

Gray and cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay shoot New York on 35mm, giving the film a tactile period look without turning it into a museum piece. The cars, clothing, technology and interiors establish the period, but the world feels lived-in rather than meticulously displayed for nostalgia.

The visual language is particularly effective because Paper Tiger is ultimately about a disappearing version of the American dream.

Irwin already has much of what previous generations would have considered success. Yet he constantly compares himself with someone who has more.

That comparison becomes destructive.

The film's title is therefore more than a reference to its crime plot. It describes the illusion of security surrounding the Pearl family. Their comfortable life looks solid until pressure is applied. Then the cracks spread quickly.

The real tragedy is the brothers themselves

The most effective idea in Paper Tiger is that the mob does not actually create the Pearl family's problems.

It exposes them.

Gary and Irwin have spent years apart, but Gary's proposition suddenly gives them a reason to spend time together again. Their dangerous partnership becomes, ironically, the closest relationship they have had in years.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about that dynamic.

Gary lies to Irwin because he wants to protect the business. Irwin hides things from his wife because he wants to protect his family. Hester keeps her own fears to herself for the same reason.

Everyone is acting out of some combination of love and self-interest.

Nobody is entirely innocent. Nobody is entirely selfish.

That is where Gray's tragedy becomes most effective. The film is not interested in asking which brother is responsible for everything that follows. Instead, it examines how affection, envy, ambition and loyalty can become impossible to separate.

Verdict

Paper Tiger works as a crime thriller, but its strongest material has little to do with the mechanics of the criminal plot.

This is a film about wanting more when you already have enough — and about how easily that desire can be disguised as responsibility.

Miles Teller gives Irwin the right combination of insecurity and decency, while Scarlett Johansson brings a quiet emotional weight to the family's collapse. But Adam Driver ultimately owns the movie. His Gary is charming, threatening, pathetic and genuinely affectionate, sometimes within the same scene.

James Gray has made another film about family, but this time the tragedy is particularly intimate. The violence surrounding the Pearls is frightening. The more disturbing realization is that the people who love each other most are also the ones capable of doing the most damage.

Paper Tiger premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. NEON is scheduled to release the film in theaters later this year.