Cannes Film Review of Paper Tiger: Between Seeing Clearly and Exposing the Truth

& Between seeing the truth clearly and exposing it outright

What kind of film is worthy of making the entire audience stand up and applaud for ten minutes straight before leaving after its Cannes premiere? James Gray's newly written and directed work Paper Tiger may hold the answer.

Starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Miles Teller, the film has been officially selected for the Competition section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival.

Rather than turning this work into a conventional gangster genre movie, Gray adopts an almost unflinching realistic perspective to set his lens on post-WWII New York, a city that seemed prosperous and booming on the surface yet seethed with undercurrents beneath.

On this promised land, the desperate struggles of these two immigrant brothers amount to an inherently futile pursuit of upward social mobility. It is far more than a family conflict; it represents Gray’s interpretation of the "American Dream" from an alternative viewpoint.

Faced with systemic violence, will blood ties tear apart easily like a paper tiger, or will people make boundless sacrifices for their family members?

Film Stills from Paper Tiger

Deconstruction of the Text: The Banality of Evil and the Anxious Predicament of the Middle Class

In terms of narrative framework, the core plot of Paper Tiger is highly concise. Irwin Pearl, played by Teller, and Linda Pearl, portrayed by Johnson, are a typical traditional American couple.

Belonging to the lower stratum of the American middle class, they raise two sons together and scrape by on a seemingly stable yet precarious job. Nevertheless, overwhelming debts beneath an outwardly prosperous life and regular monthly bills turn into an invisible black hole eroding their dignity.

In stark contrast stands Gary Pearl, the elder brother played by Driver, whose lifestyle is worlds apart. A former New York City police officer fresh off a divorce, he lives alone in a landmark high-rise building in New York, filling his days with cigars, alcohol and the noise of sports games. His deliberate display of class superiority sharply depicts a seasoned, somewhat arrogant white elite who navigates between high society and criminal gangs.

Film Stills from Paper Tiger

The film adopts an intricate dual-narrative structure. The main storyline centers on how this ordinary American middle-class family spirals out of control amid the looming, relentless threats from the Russian mafia; the secondary storyline depicts Gary’s internal human struggle as he grapples with tangled power dynamics and emotions, striving desperately to protect his younger brother.

In terms of character portrayal, while Linda, depicted as a conventional wife, comes across as somewhat one-dimensional on the page of the screenplay, Johnson breathes life into the role through a restrained yet intensely charged and explosive performance. She powerfully and strikingly conveys the profound pain and despair inflicted upon the family and herself by her husband’s incompetence, foolishness and cowardice.

Film Stills from Paper Tiger

A Victory of Sight and Sound: Cornfield Shootout and Psychedelic Visions of Fate

While the main narrative feels slightly flat in certain passages, the film undoubtedly attains masterful craftsmanship in its audio-visual language and use of light and shadow. Gray employs the camera to wield light and shadow as a narrative device, weaving a psychedelic vision of America steeped in a sense of inevitability.

Whether it is the eerie iridescent reflections rippling across the surface of the river contaminated by waste oil as Owen walks toward it, or the shotgun-shaped shadow he frantically casts on the wall to bluff his way through when gang members burst through the door at midnight, light and shadow throughout the film serve as metaphors for an ominous fate.

The climactic shootout set in a cornfield near the film’s closing acts as a stroke of genius. Deftly leveraging blind spots created by the terrain and the distant rumble of aircraft engines overhead as ambient sound, Gray cranks spatial claustrophobia and temporal urgency to their utmost extreme.

The erratic trajectories of stray bullets and every precise headshot are executed with impeccably controlled pacing, fostering an illusory hope in viewers that the protagonist might instinctively evade his destined reckoning.

Yet the finale delivers a brutal, sobering shock that shatters this fatalistic fantasy completely. All characters are jolted back to the cold, ugly reality of their lives, leaving only Owen trapped within an ethereal middle-class illusion constructed for him through the lies and sacrifices of his brother and wife.

Film Stills from Paper Tiger

Conclusion

Throughout the entire film, although Paper Tiger adopts a restrained narrative tone and features a relatively plain plot development, its audiovisual presentation, spatial arrangement and cinematography are extremely solid and elaborate.

For the Cannes Film Festival, the criteria for evaluating a work have never been limited to how exciting and twisting the story is. Instead, it lies in how creators interpret film as a pure visual art form to the highest standard.

Image: From the Internet

Author: L. Lu

Typesetting: Lu Xuanlong

Managing Editor: Lu Xuanlong