Critic's Notebook

Festival de Cannes

With “Paper Tiger,” James Gray goes back to the scene of an old crime more than three decades after “Little Odessa.” And I’m at a loss as to why. Same boroughs, same Russians, same brothers in over their heads, like a designer reissuing an old collection in a new colorway and calling it a vision. The setting is Queens, 1986. Two ordinary brothers tangle with Russian gangsters and still cling, with the faith of people who don’t read the papers, to the notion that a clean exit exists, one that will let them walk away with their good threads unspoiled.

A period piece should earn its nostalgia by seeing what the period couldn’t, by pulling the lining out of events that were once opaque, sealed shut by whoever held power then. “Paper Tiger” makes no such alterations. It sheds no light and provides no corrective. What it offers instead is a warm bath of nostalgia, and I kept wondering about the water. Why fondly recall the Reagan-era American dream, with its family values, a picket fence that was never once gated against organized crime? The decade is worn here like a vintage jacket whose shoulder pads are meant to read as strength and which hangs, instead, like a tattered hand-me-down.

Adam Driver plays Gary, an ex-cop with pizzazz to burn. He invites himself to dinner at his brother’s and arrives bearing a porterhouse for six from Peter Luger Steak House, the kind of entrance that says money, or at least makes a convincing impression of it. But Mr. Driver’s top billing is a decoy. Gary, for all the voltage he gives off, is hardly the main character. He’s there on business, with a pitch for Irwin (Miles Teller), the Ivy-educated and resolutely practical engineer: clean up and develop the infamous toxic wasteland known as the Gowanus Canal. Gary is already collecting a fat check from Alexei Yunov (Yavor Vesselinov) for consulting, and he talks like a man who has never asked what the check is really for.

Irwin, being the type to do his homework, does it here and stumbles onto something off limits. Russian goons kidnap him and pistol-whip him, while his young sons, Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel), waiting in the car, are likewise traumatized. When he is released, he finds the kids but not the car, a small humiliation tacked on like a cheap button after the damage is done. Soon Gary learns from Semion Bogoyavich (Victor Ptak) that Alexei is out of the picture and that he’s on the hook for more than 10 times the amount he is paid. His former colleagues in law enforcement are now compromised. Then, in case anyone thought the family might at least sleep soundly, Irwin’s home is broken into while they sleep.

Mr. Gray won’t grant us even the courtesy of false hope. Everything is grim, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, only another tunnel, dimly lit and tastefully shot. Irwin’s wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), has serious health issues that require surgery, and the melodrama keeps stacking up, layer on layer, until “Paper Tiger” becomes a truly suffocating experience, like a winter coat zipped to the chin in a boiler room. The supporting cast – especially the cohort playing the Russians who operate out of Brighton Beach – is wholly convincing. They wear their roles like skin. The leads, by contrast, don’t sell it. Reuniting Mr. Driver and Ms. Johansson after “Marriage Story” reads as a failure of imagination, a casting-by-algorithm choice, and Ms. Johansson hardly justifies it with a performance that mostly resembles a child’s tantrum.

It is this relentless negativity, and the unbearable self-seriousness with which it’s applied to a different time, that feels so divorced culturally and politically from this moment, one defined by documentaries like “NAZA,” “Musk,” and “You Can See Everything.” The ’80s, as Mr. Gray remembers them, do not illuminate the present. What we get are movie stars playing dress-up, begging us to invest in problems that are neither real nor even allegorical. It’s detached from reality, and not even entertaining, unlike “Anora,” which at least looked at the Brighton Beach Russians from a contemporary angle and had the decency to have fun. “Paper Tiger” is vacuous awards bait, a costume party with nothing at stake but what the cast and crew imagine for themselves.