The Great Director You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

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This week marks the limited-theater release of Paper Tiger, a muted, tragic crime thriller that’s the latest film in the director James Gray’s heady oeuvre. The story, set in Brooklyn and Queens in the 1980s, manages to be both tightly focused and operatic in scale: Two brothers (played by Adam Driver and Miles Teller) get in over their heads on a business scheme, and must watch as their dream of climbing the social ladder is brutally ripped away—partly thanks to their own mistakes. This tale of relatably flawed people is, in my opinion, one of the year’s must-see films, which is true basically anytime Gray makes a movie. And yet, so many cinemagoers still seem to have never heard of him.

That lack of awareness could be partly because only a couple of his films could reasonably be called hits—the 2007 cop thriller We Own the Night was a solid performer, and his sci-fi epic, Ad Astra, did reasonable (if unspectacular) business in 2019. Big-name actors like working with Gray, including Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Mark Wahlberg, and Scarlett Johansson, who co-stars in Paper Tiger; their eager participation helps him secure $15 million budgets. But his films are usually dark affairs that don’t leave the audience with easy answers or tidy lessons learned. Most of them take place in outer-borough New York; many are period pieces. In short: hardly mainstream.

Yet Gray often finds a way to tell these stories on the margins through seemingly glitzy trappings. In Paper Tiger, the characters’ entire story arcs might amount to a two-minute conversation you hear in the background of a much grander mob movie: Driver plays Gary Pearl, a former cop who has become a showboat of a private-security consultant, while Teller is his industrious brother, Irwin, an engineer who’s married to Hester (Johansson) with two teenage kids. Gary talks Irwin into going into business with him helping to clean up an industrial lot in Brooklyn’s polluted Gowanus Canal, promising big money in return; quickly, it becomes clear that they are working with the Russian mob, and Irwin’s attention to detail is perceived by the gangsters as untoward snooping. From there, Gary and Irwin’s illusions of professional safety quickly vanish.

The dreadful violence and recrimination that follow feels both completely avoidable and utterly inevitable. That tension is what defines so many of Gray’s films—some Shakespearean drama happening on a prosaic, human level. The violence is always shocking and narratively earned, while still feeling intensely cinematic (there’s a shoot-out sequence near the end of Paper Tiger that is one of the coolest action sequences I’ve seen in a movie all year). We Own the Night has an incredible car chase that echoes classics of the genre, such as The French Connection; Ad Astra features a thrilling set piece involving moon-buggy warfare unlike anything I’d ever seen staged in a sci-fi movie. Yet both of those films are also about the kind of interpersonal drama a friend might tell you about over a long night of drinking at a bar.

No matter what the setting, Gray homes in on the most understandable sorts of failure. The excellent Two Lovers is a tragicomic romance, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, that transposes the tale of a Dostoyevsky character (inspired by the story “White Nights”) to modern-day Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn. Another tale of the sort is The Lost City of Z, an adaptation of David Grann’s fantastic nonfiction work about the explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished deep in the Amazon while looking for evidence of ancient civilization. These are fatally flawed protagonists, heroes as likely to be felled by family trauma as by grandiose ambition.

Paper Tiger is one of Gray’s best movies, and it’s attracting rave reviews. Yet I worry it’s going to go the same route as most of his filmography—highly praised, with underwhelming ticket sales and little awards attention. The film played at the Cannes Film Festival, where Gray’s work has been in competition six times without ever winning an award (even he seems sick of going there). He’s received zero Oscar nominations over the course of a storied career. It’s hard to put a finger on why; perhaps his work is too minor-key for voting bodies. Obviously, the biggest win for any director is getting to make more movies, and I think Gray will continue to do that without much issue—great actors always seem to want to collaborate with him. But a film like Paper Tiger deserves to be seen widely; go if you can, and you’ll soon want to delve into the rest of Gray’s fascinating, knotty filmography.

An Essay I Enjoyed

The Unbearable Mediocrity of Microdramas

By Elise Hannum

For one weekend in October, the AMC theater off of New York City’s Union Square wasn’t playing any recognizable new releases. Instead, it was closed to the general public, with the sidewalk outside taken over by a small red carpet covered by a white tent, where the occasional group of attractive actor types in suits and gowns got their photo taken. Inside, the bar offered a promotional cocktail; a merch stand downstairs sold exclusive baseball caps and tote bags. The attendees were there to watch screenings, but not of traditional wide-screen features: These films took up only a sliver of the screen, with a five-foot black space on either side.

Read the full article.

Coming Attractions

Until this week, James Gunn and Peter Safran, the co-heads of DC Studios, seemed to have no reason to fear for their jobs. Clayface, the latest installment in the comic-book movie franchise, was a mild success at the box office; they seemed to have made it through the huge post–Warner Bros.–Paramount merger unscathed. Well, no more: Skydance, as that new company is called, announced on Monday that Gunn and Safran were exiting the company, just four years after taking the roles.

On the one hand, I’m sad to see them go, as their creative perspective came across as quite exciting and not so ruthlessly corporate. Releasing an adaptation of Clayface before introducing the franchise’s take on Batman is wacky, yet the end result was a pretty fun bit of gory horror that did decent business. On the other hand, as I noted in a previous edition of the newsletter, that movie did next to nothing to advance any wider stories—ostensibly the goal for an interconnected series that tends to receive two or three big new installments a year. And while Gunn and Safran also had a couple of other projects in the pipeline (including the Gunn-directed Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, in theaters next summer), their rollout of the new DC universe had been arguably plodding.

My guess is that the Skydance CEO David Ellison wants to win over the broadest audience possible, more in line with what Marvel has achieved over the past two decades. He’s even brought in a former Marvel employee as Gunn and Safran’s replacement: Jeremy Latcham, an ex–senior vice president. His creative bona fides seem more limited than Gunn and Safran’s; he’s never been involved with big storytelling decisions. But Latcham will likely be tasked with moving along new movies starring more familiar characters as quickly as possible, as DC fights for attention in a crowded comic-book-cinema landscape.

Do people want that kind of saturation, though? The Marvel Cinematic Universe has massively slowed down in recent years, as ticket sales fell. The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday basically promises a full reset, likely simplifying the franchise’s sprawling “multiverse.” A statement from Gunn on his departure even suggested mild relief that those sorts of creative choices will no longer be his problem: “The past four years [of] my time at DC Studios has been trying, to say the least,” he wrote on social media. “I dislike the at-times corporate nature of the job.” Now he’ll just be tasked with putting on a brave face as a sequel he directed is released by different bosses. At least he will no longer have to answer endless fan questions about the meaning of every casting decision.

What Else I’m Watching

• I plan on writing about Lee Chang-dong’s wonderful new drama Possible Love soon, now that it’s streaming on Netflix. In anticipation, I’ve completed my journey through his filmography; 2010’s Poetry is really worth a watch (it’s also streaming on Netflix, as well as the Criterion Channel). It’s a spare portrait of a suburban woman dealing with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis and a horrifying scandal involving her grandson. But it’s also about her growing interest in writing poetry, and the brief moments of transcendence that come through art. Lee, who directed 2018’s excellent Burning as well, is so good at marrying the unsettling and the sublime.

• I also rewatched Bad Day at Black Rock, a neo-Western classic from the ’50s that I picked because it was the shortest movie on my friend’s Letterboxd watch list (sue me, I was tired). It’s 81 minutes long, but that’s not the only reason to recommend it: It’s a wonderfully tense little mystery, in which a stoic Spencer Tracy arrives at a desolate hamlet somewhere out West in search of a missing Japanese person and meets stiff resistance. While the events all build into a nasty showdown, the themes dig a lot deeper than simple vengeance—it’s one of the best, earliest films to wrestle with America’s World War II–era racism toward the Japanese.