NEW YORK – “Paper Tiger” isn’t your average slice of ‘80s nostalgia.
Legwarmers and Rubik’s cubes went out the window in James Gray’s elegiac crime drama, which opened the New York Film Festival Sept. 25 ahead of its release in theaters Nov. 13.
Instead, the writer-director takes a relatively subdued approach to the decade, as he follows a pair of brothers, Gary (Adam Driver) and Irwin (Miles Teller), who get mixed up with the Russian mob in late 1980s Queens, New York.
The film features career-best work from Driver and especially Teller, who scrambles to protect his teenage sons and wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson), who is privately facing battles of her own. Johansson goes big with a thick accent and voluminous curls, although she reins in her performance
for the movie’s poignant last half hour.
“Paper Tiger” is semi-autobiographical for Gray, 66, who grew up in New York and tried to capture a snapshot of the city he once knew.
Now, “it looks nothing like it did in 1986,” Gray said Sept. 25 at a midday festival press conference, where he was joined by Driver and Teller. “People dress nothing like that, the hair with these perms. My mother had that hairstyle and it does look ridiculous, but it's accurate to what it was. The only thing we did do was limit the shoulder pads, because especially for women, they looked like they were about to play [football player] Joe Namath in a bio film. The shoulder padding out here was risible. So the furthest we went was the hair."
“You have to try to get the details right, but you have to actually not do as much as there was, because then it would look like parody,” Gray continues. “It’s a tricky and fine line. … People are really sticklers about that sort of thing, especially you see these IMDb goofs. In the end, it’s all an abstraction. The movie is like a dream state – it’s not a documentary. People looking for that kind of accuracy, I find to be a little bit dunderheaded.”
Teller and Driver mostly ceded the microphone to Gray throughout the half-hour-long Q&A, although they did occasionally chime in to praise the filmmaker’s collaborative nature on set. Driver, too, warmly received a compliment from an audience member, who praised the actor’s “style and swagger” since 2024’s “Megalopolis.”
“Honestly, it’s just kind of the part you’re being asked to play,” Driver said with a grin. “I certainly wasn’t conscious of, ‘This is a moment for me to whip out my swagger.’ I’m doing it now, in case anyone can [tell].”
"Paper Tiger" premiered at France's Cannes Film Festival in May, earning 83% positive reviews on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.
New York Film Festival runs for just over two weeks, with talent including Pedro Pascal (“Behemoth!”), Ava DuVernay (“14th”), Andrew Garfield (“Artificial”), and Paul Rudd (“A Statement”) world-premiering their latest projects. Julianne Moore (“The Debut”), Jordan Firstman (“Club Kid”) and Kate O’Flynn (“Tender Loving Care”) will also be on hand touting their well-reviewed Oscar hopefuls.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Scarlett Johansson's mob movie 'Paper Tiger' avoided '80s 'parody'
