James Gray is the least heralded major American filmmaker now working. From Little Odessa, released in 1994 when he was 25, to his new film Paper Tiger, his ninth, Gray has carved out a serious body of work in American movies at a time when most American movies have no time for anything serious. As Jordan Mintzer observed in his book of interviews with the director, Gray inhabits the difficult space between personal filmmaking — his movies often take place among the Russian Jews of Brooklyn and Queens amongst whom Gray grew up — and studio filmmaking, or what studio filmmaking was before it became product with no interest in being anything more than the latest package of Twinkies to roll off the assembly line, no connection to recognizable human emotion or psychology. There’s nothing meta or smartass about Gray’s movies. They don’t provide catch phrases or scenes that get endlessly replayed as internet memes. His technique, the invisible kind that doesn’t announce itself, has more in common with a classic Hollywood craftsman like William Wyler than with some hot shot playing with camera angles and editing for no other reason than because he can. Gray trusts that the conflicts he delineates in the scripts he writes or co-writes will be brought to the fore by the impeccable performances he routinely gets from his casts. There’s no hysteria, no need to whip up what, in these studies of how violence and civic corruption impinge on family life, is already fraught. The violence in these films, when it occurs, is sudden, never graphic, and absent any impulse to aestheticize. Gray has said he wants the violence in his films to be abrupt and ungraceful, just like it was when, as a teenager in the ‘80s, he saw a man shot in front of him as he left a record shop on St. Mark’s Place. The car chase that comes about midway through We Own the Night (2007), one of the most unnerving ever filmed, rejects the fast cuts, accelerated speed, city avenues somehow miraculously clear of traffic, all things that emphasize visceral charge over the emotions of the characters. This chase proceeds at a medium tempo, in the rain, on a highway (the Bruckner Expressway) densely populated by other cars. The pursued keep losing sight of their pursuers, the rain pours down while the windshield wipers provide only fleeting glimpses of the road ahead, there’s no space to speed up or execute some fancy move. This is a nightmare that the viewer is in as much as the characters; there’s no adrenaline rush to alleviate the nervous tension.
Gray is a somber filmmaker but never a ponderous or punishing one. The voluptuousness in his movies, a melancholy one, lies in the depth of the emotions. That’s true even when the emotions are understated, as AT the end of We Own the Night when the brothers played by Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg quietly tell each other, “I love you,” or when, as in Paper Tiger during the final scene shared by the brothers played by Miles Teller and Adam Driver, the emotions are so under wraps these men can’t bring themselves to say anything at all.
It’s no surprise that Gray, like many American artists before him, has found the most eloquent and passionate critical defenders among the French. (Paper Tiger was enthusiastically received at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the sixth of his nine films to compete for the Palme d’Or.) France is currently making the best movies in the world (just this year it has given us Hafsia Herzi’s Little Sister, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Young Mothers, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Vie Privée, Alice Winocour’s Couture). A country that still produces movies for adults can appreciate Gray’s. In his own country Gray has his passionate defenders, but often even the critical enthusiasm for his work feels muted. Not surprising at a time when most American movie critics seem stuck between donnish academicism and fanboy effusiveness, their judgements based less in any real experience, any sense of how art might connect with life than with a kind of meta knowingness that says nothing is worth taking too seriously, worth making a case for, worth exposing yourself by expressing any sort of passion—which is exactly the attitude of many of the films that get praised. (The best joke in film circles during the last few years: “Why is it called A24?” “A 24-year-old kid thinks this is the best movie he’s ever seen.”)
It has been gratifying then to know not just how Paper Tiger was received at Cannes but that it was chosen to open this year’s New York Film Festival on September 25 (it will be released theatrically in November), and that, in what should be the first of several, Little Odessa has been added to the Criterion Collection.
With the exception of the outer-space drama Ad Astra (which was taken away from Gray and recut) and his beautiful film of David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z, all of Gray’s movies take place in New York, usually Queens or Brooklyn. These are movies in which, despite the threats to family life from the violence without, home itself is not always welcoming or sustaining.
Gray’s films can be seen as a series of leave takings and homecomings, the former never guaranteeing anything like freedom, the latter often as much trap as sanctuary. In the astonishing split-screen shot that closes The Immigrant, set in and around Ellis Island in 1921, Marion Cotillard and her sister sail away from us towards the new American life they’ve dreamed of on the left side of the screen while on the right side, Joaquin Phoenix, reflected in a mirror so it appears as if he’s walking in the same direction as the women, retreats into a present in which his future is all used up. It’s a moment in which time collapses, in which hope and its absence rub right up against one another. In Gray’s films, blood ties continually call people back to places they have been trying to escape. In We Own the Night we see the suffocating burden of tradition weighing on Joaquin Phoenix’s Bobby Green. His character has rejected going to work for the NYPD, as his decorated brother (Mark Wahlberg) and father (Robert Duvall) do, and chosen instead to manage a plush Brooklyn nightclub. When the drug business his bosses are involved in threatens his family Bobby comes back to the fold and we experience this not as the prodigal’s welcome return but as surrender, a nullification of the wild joy and sensuality of the life he was living (sensuality embodied here by his girlfriend, played by Eva Mendes and photographed as ravishingly as any woman in American movies since Ava Gardner). Similarly, in Two Lovers (2008), Phoenix, as Leonard, the troubled son of a Brighton Beach family, gives up his dreams of love in Manhattan with the alluring and emotionally short-circuited young woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) who has moved into his family’s apartment building and settles for the nice, predictable girl (Vinessa Shaw) whose family shares ties with his. The final scene finds the pair about to be engaged and as we watch Leonard sink into this life, the water he throws himself into in the opening scene becomes the metaphorical water closing over his head. (A word about Joaquin Phoenix’s performances in these movies and in The Immigrant, in which he plays a pimp whose preying ground is Ellis Island and whose targets are the young women who have just landed in America: Phoenix plays these vastly different characters as both wounded adolescent and needy child. Watching him it’s as if on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean and Sal Mineo had somehow become one person.)
In the great final scene of Moss Hart’s memoir Act One, Hart, on the rainswept morning following his first wildly successful Broadway opening night, appears at the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his brother and parents, instructs them they are to pack one suitcase each, and ushers them into a cab bound for Manhattan and a new life. Before he does, though, Hart returns to the apartment and opens the windows, letting the torrential rain roar in and ruin the shabby furnishings carted over the years from places just like this one. Whether it’s true or not, as some have disputed, the scene represents the freedom unavailable to Gray’s characters. There is a direct line in his movies from the cramped ‘20s tenement apartments we see in The Immigrant, with shawls draped on mantelpieces and a few framed family pictures used as meager attempts at decoration, to the later cramped family apartments and houses of Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, Armageddon Time, Paper Tiger, all populated by first- and second-generation Americans. The tchotchkes and photos, the heavy mahogany furniture that’s been handed down from generation to generation, all of these impart an overwhelming sense of airlessness that, even when the characters have achieved middle-class comfort, weighs down the fresh start America promises with heavy claims of the past. There is, in these rooms, what Ruth Gordon famously called “the brown taste of poverty,” or the memory of it. Manhattan is just a few subway stops away and yet his characters hardly go there. The city is most often seen in long shot, the skyline hovering over the boroughs and as distant and foreign as the idea of the city must have felt to these characters’ ancestors in the villages of Ukraine. Even the lower east side neighborhoods in The Immigrant (rendered with the kind of sensual vividness they have in The Godfather, Part II), feel as if we are in the late years of the nineteenth century though it is set in 1921. Gray’s work is suffused with a profound realization of just how temporary the twin sanctuaries of family and home are, and an equally profound and sad knowledge of how that brief security haunts us.
That’s the haunting that permeates Gray’s two most recent films, Armageddon Time and Paper Tiger. Armageddon Time was in and out of theaters in about a week in 2022 though its subject couldn’t be more pertinent. No other movie, and few American artists or commentators, has connected the start of the Reagan era with its current apotheosis in the Trump era as Gray does here. Which is to say the film is about the journey from covert corruption to corruption practiced and celebrated openly, and about how the rhetoric of getting ahead, of doing better than the generation before, rhetoric to which Americans have always been particularly susceptible, became appropriated to justify the worst sort of greed, the most virulent civic disengagement. (This is also the subject of Heather Ann Thompson’s recent book on the Bernie Goetz vigilante shootings Fear and Fury.)
Set in the weeks before and just after Reagan’s 1980 election, Armageddon Time takes its title from the 1979 song by the Clash, the first line of which, as it’s used here — “a lot of people won’t get no supper tonight” — portends America entry into an era in which those words will no longer describe just the very poor. The protagonist is Paul (Banks Repeta, whose kid’s recklessness and stammering hesitations in the face of authority are note perfect) a frail-looking but flinty 12-year-old living in Queens with his older brother, his plumber father (Jermey Strong,) and his schoolteacher mother (a never-better Anne Hathaway). Paul, who wants to be an artist, is the proverbial gifted kid and bad student. Without any real friends he plays at being the class clown, except that his jokes always backfire, landing him in trouble and even more distanced from his classmates. The one friend Paul does make is Johnny (Jaylin Webb), the only black kid in his class, holding on in a shaky home situation in which he’s cared for by his ailing grandmother, and even more of a whipping boy for his harried and conventional teacher than Paul is. (Like Frederick Wiseman’s documentary High School, Armageddon Time has an acute sense of the public school mediocrities who make it their personal mission to crush any glimmer of individuality or dissent.)
Paul and Johnny have too much spark to knuckle under completely when they get in trouble and so they keep getting in even worse trouble. Gray’s fascination is with how Paul comes to learn that his race and class, even at his modest middle-class level, even though he’s a Jew, afford him protection that Johnny doesn’t have. Part of the honesty of the movie is that even though Paul’s parents and grandparents are solidly Democrats, deriding Reagan whenever he appears on television, their desire to see Paul and his brother get ahead leads them to their own version of the Look Out for Number One rapaciousness soon to take over the culture. After one too many scrapes at his public school, Paul follows his brother to a Queens private academy. His parents see this as the beginning of Paul’s turnaround. They even saddle him with a ridiculous attaché case they believe is the mark of a serious student. It’s Paul’s first time among kids raised to think of themselves as elite and when one of them sees him talking to Johnny through the playground fence at recess he asks Paul, incredulously, if he went to school with “niggers.” This casual racism is echoed by the looming presence of one of the school’s benefactors, the father of our current Dear Leader, racist real-estate magnate Fred Trump, played by John Diehl and looking like the kind of seedy, greasy old coot you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the subway.
Gray isn’t a finger pointer. He knows racism isn’t just the province of entitled private school kids and businessmen who didn’t rent to black families. At a family dinner discussing how Paul and his brother need to get out of the public schools, his grandmother (Tovah Feldshuh) says it’s necessary because the blacks are flooding in, as if she’s describing an invading army which is likely how she thought of them. This from a woman old enough to remember the persecution her Ukrainian relatives experienced and, in some cases, didn’t survive. And yet, despite the film’s sharp political edge, Gray is a humanist filmmaker and he makes sure we understand that this woman is motivated by concern for her grandchildren. But that understanding dissipates when we think of an entire country with no concern or compassion for anyone outside of their own and what we’re left with is disgust.
Racism is not the movie’s only subject. Most creative kids get bored at school, sick of hearing a teacher’s umpteenth rehashing of information that seems to have no connection to their lives, that doesn’t stir their imagination. You listen to the canned lessons Paul is enduring and can hardly blame him for sketching instead. But in the America the movie is showing us the entire idea of education — whether it’s coming from concerned parents or grandparents, teachers and administrators parroting trite motivational speeches, or leeches like Fred Trump and his judge daughter MaryAnne (an uncredited Jessica Chastain) — has become reduced to nothing more than a vehicle for getting ahead entirely divorced from any idea of the public good, or the acquisition of knowledge and culture for their own sake. This, Gray is saying, is the source of our current national debasement.
And yet there is a moral center here and it is personified by Anthony Hopkins (in one of the two or three best screen performances he’s ever given) as Paul’s grandfather. He’s the one who pushes for Paul to go to private school. His memory of how antisemitism maimed his mother’s life (seeing her parents murdered in front of her), his realization of how the game is rigged for Jews in America, makes him determined not to see his own favorite grandson left behind. But that knowledge has not robbed him of his basic decency. In one heartrending scene when Paul admits to his beloved grandfather that the white kids at his school deride black kids, his grandfather hits him with a question he can’t dodge. “And what do you do when that happens?,” he asks Paul, who answers, “Obviously nothing of course.” His grandfather doesn’t hold back. “I think that’s a crock of horseshit,” he says. “You’ve got to do something, you’ve got to say something . . . you were raised better than that. Those bastards who say all that crap and garbage to your face will say the same stuff behind your back and they’ll shove a knife straight in your gut and they’ll smile as they do it. Fuck ‘em! . . . You remember one thing, the next time those kids say anything bad about those black kids or those Hispanics, you be a mensch to those kids. They never had your advantage.” If those words sound simple transcribed here, the moral force with which Hopkins delivers them is fierce, and they end on the very thing that no one else in the movie mentions, that no one seems aware of: the moral responsibility that comes with advantage, that comes if you simply want to think of yourself as a decent human being. That it’s a child learning these lessons, growing up when public institutions offer no moral or intellectual guidance, that even Paul at this early stage of his life bears guilt and responsibility for the calamity that swallows Johnny while he escapes makes Armageddon Time an enormously painful coming-of-age story. That we as an audience are hearing those words in a country that has chosen to abjure that moral responsibility makes them even more painful.
Paper Tiger is set six years later, in 1986 when Reagan and the economic and moral destruction he brought seemed to have become an immovable force in public life. The characters are again a family in Queens, two brothers (Gavin Goudrey and Roman Engel), their engineer father Irwin (Miles Teller), and their mother Hester (Scarlett Johansson). This family is doing well, not wanting, but it’s hard for them to resist when an opportunity to make money comes along.
The offer comes from Irwin’s brother Gary (Adam Driver) a former cop who left the force because he didn’t want to go on the take and has formed a successful security business. Gary is the cool uncle, the flashy relative who treats you to what you couldn’t otherwise have. When he invites himself over to dinner, he brings catering from Peter Luger because, he explains, it’s become too dangerous to go to Luger’s itself. (1986 was early in New York City’s most violent and dangerous years which hit their peak in 1990 with a record 2245 homicides.) After he’s charmed Hester and palled around with his nephews, Gary lays out a proposition to Irwin. Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal is being cleaned up in anticipation of businesses relocating there. He has gotten involved with a Russian company and wants Irwin to manage their waste disposal. He takes Irwin to meet the man he’s dealing with at the company’s site and the Russians are immediately suspicious. Gary brushes off their paranoia as a flimsy vestige of a totalitarian communist society.
It doesn’t take long for everything to go south. What’s unnerving is how quickly and thoroughly it does. Paper Tiger, which is at moments almost unbearably tense, is a particularly frightening example of Gray’s traditional theme — the evanescence of home and the safety it represents. Soon, Irwin is being threatened by the Russians (who are, of course, mobsters) and so is his family. When he awakens at night to hear someone prowling around downstairs he gets a rifle, convinces them he means business and they should get out of his house. They do but when he comes downstairs he finds his living room furniture rearranged and a series of Polaroids taken moments before showing each family member asleep. It’s a violation without violence but no less scary because of that.
If The Godfather was a nightmare version of capitalism, the nightmare of Paper Tiger is that what the Russians are doing to this family is simply a less subtle version of the corporate ruthlessness that the Reagan years extolled (and the thugs themselves are a less grandiose version of the strongmen Trump is drawn to and, in the case of Putin, perhaps in the pocket of). Gary tells Irwin he will handle this threat but he can’t. The Russians, it turns out, don’t want to get into business with Gary, they want his old police contacts to smooth their illegal schemes. And when Gary turns to his old comrades still on the force, he finds them resentful that he never went on the take and even more resentful that he’s screwing up this new source of graft of which they’re happy to partake. Corruption in Paper Tiger is total, even down to the details of a confidential meeting with the FBI being leaked (we’re not told by who) to the gangsters.
This is the third of Gray’s films in which a brother’s homecoming spells catastrophe for his family. In Little Odessa it’s the hit man played by Tim Roth who destroys his family by returning home. In We Own the Night it’s Joaquin Phoenix’s inadvertent involvement with a Russian drug gang that threatens the lives of his brother and father. Adam Driver’s Gary isn’t a bad guy but he’s a willfully naïve one. In recent years, Driver has been so recessive as an actor he’s come close to being a blank spot on the screen. This is the best acting he’s done since Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 Paterson. The tension in the performance lies in watching a man who prides himself on his professionalism realize he’s in way over his head and his family’s safety is at stake. There’s a believable fraternal familiarity in the interactions between Driver and Teller (who, similarly, is better than he’s been in some time, grounded and not at all showy), love, yes, but a love eroded by bitterness and resentment.
Scarlett Johansson’s Hester, carrying a bigger burden than any of the men surrounding her, is the most heartbreaking figure in the movie. She plays a good woman who loves her husband and sons, is grateful for the life she has, and is fighting to retain control in the face of two separate poisonous intrusions. Hester is, on the surface, an ordinary person, but she evinces beautiful depth at the threats to her family. In the scene immediately following the home invasion, as Hester begins to comprehend just how dangerous her life has become, Johansson does something very difficult: she captures a woman threatening to devolve into anger and untrammeled fear without ever losing her actor’s control. She goes even further in the doctor’s office scene where Hester is given a diagnosis for which she’s not at all prepared. She shows a woman who’s already in fear for her life trying desperately to maintain her social composure in the face of another, seemingly inescapable threat. Gray keeps his camera on Johansson’s face as it betrays the minute tics and tremors of someone trying not to go to pieces and the dazed disbelief of someone who’s just a beat behind as she registers what’s happening to her. You may have had the experience of seeing someone get devastating medical news. If you have, you’ll find yourself struck dumb by the veracity of Johansson’s performance. If not, you may be struck dumb by it anyway.
Order is restored by the end of Paper Tiger but we can see nothing is ever going to be the same. The family is still together at the end of the film but already a memory just like the country we thought we knew is for all of us.
In the final scene of Armageddon Time, Paul walks out of a school dance presided over by smarmy self-congratulatory Fred Trump (who intones “I couldn’t have more hope than I do at this very moment”) and Gray cuts to a series of shots of the camera withdrawing from the locations of the film, the private school, Paul’s public school classroom and, significantly, the home that was once his refuge, all of them now empty. He’s walking away from all of it. And we in the audience know that whatever future he is walking towards, just as whatever future is left for the characters in Paper Tiger, will be the future we are living in, where what’s boundless is not hope but the country’s ability to keep hitting a deeper moral and spiritual bottom. As World War II broke out, W.H. Auden wrote of the ‘30s as “a low, dishonest decade.” Gray’s characters have at least four decades of that low dishonesty ahead of them. Those of us watching these films have perhaps even more debasement ahead of us. It’s part of the derangement of our present cultural life that the American filmmaker who has captured this better than any other is without the acclaim that, in any sane time, he would have — acclaim he has so richly earned.