An Offbeat Director Worth Your Time
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.
Key points
- Obviously, the biggest win for any director is getting to make more movies, and I think….
- 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.
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.
Additional details
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
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