The American dream has rarely looked dreamy in a James Gray movie. In the new trailer for Paper Tiger, two brothers discover that chasing a better life can come with a price tag considerably steeper than they expected.
Adam Driver stars as Gary Pearl,
a former police officer whose younger brother, Irwin (Miles Teller), is looking to get ahead in 1980s New York. Their ambitions seem ordinary enough at first: family, money, a little more stability. But Irwin’s latest business venture brings the brothers into the orbit of the Russian mob, and what begins as an opportunity quickly turns into a threat to everything they have built.
The trailer starts in the familiar territory of family and aspiration before gradually tightening its grip. Driver and Teller move through Queens and Brooklyn, surrounded by muted colors and hard edges of Gray’s New York, while the promise of easy money gives way to danger. Scarlett Johansson plays Hester, Irwin’s wife, whose family is pulled into the fallout as the brothers’ scheme begins to fall apart.
Gray has spent much of his career excavating the particular anxieties of New York families trying to climb a few rungs higher in society. From Little Odessa to The Yards and We Own the Night, his movies have often treated the city as a pressure cooker, where ambition and loyalty often collide head-on. Paper Tiger, out Nov. 13, returns him to Queens, where he grew up, and the crime-film territory that first established his reputation.
This time, Gray looks backward with a distinctly contemporary vision. In his conversation with Rolling Stone, the filmmaker described the movie as being concerned with what happens when financial success becomes the dominant measure of a person’s worth: “I had long tried to find an idea for a story about where we are today, which is the unquestioned supremacy of market economics over everything — what is the cost? What’s the price we pay for that?” Instead of simply focusing on whether or not the Pearls can get rich, he zeroes in on what happens to their sense of right and wrong when money becomes the measuring tool that tells them whether or not they’ve succeeded.
That ominous focus runs beneath the trailer, beneath the guns, frantic confrontations, cars, and glimpses of a family suddenly forced to look over its shoulder. The Pearls don’t initially set out to become criminals. They want what countless American families have wanted for ages: security and a place in the world. The trouble only begins when the shortcut to get there looks too good to refuse, when their dreams of wealth “are unmoored from ethical and moral consideration,” as Gray puts it.
The film reunites Driver and Johansson for the first time since Marriage Story. Gray wrote and directed the film, which also marks his return to New York after the autobiographical Armageddon Time, his 2022 coming-of-age drama.
Paper Tiger premiered in competition at Cannes in May, where it received a lengthy standing ovation. The film will get another major hometown showcase this fall, as it is set to open the 2026 New York Film Festival on Sept. 25 at Alice Tully Hall.
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