James Gray’s star-studded ‘Paper Tiger’ is a murky crime thriller about ignorant squares

Fittingly for a crime thriller about the umpteenth failed attempt to decontaminate the Gowanus Canal, the dangerous ideas in James Gray’s “Paper Tiger” lurk under its plenty filthy surface.

It’s 1986 and two brothers launch a business advising the companies along this polluted waterfront on how to come into legal environmental compliance. In truth, it’s impossible. This two-mile stretch of river is a symbol of the devil’s bargain between big business and consumers. Over a century ago, the Gowanus played a vital role in industrializing New York City — and, by extension, the United States — as a hub for coal, gas, cement, chemical and meatpacking plants along with heritage corporations including Kraft, Coca-Cola and Sears. The country got rich, shoppers got easier access to goods and the ground got poisoned.

Irwin (Miles Teller), a family man and engineer, would earnestly like to clean up the neighborhood. Gary (Adam Driver), a divorced ex-cop and the older and better-connected of the siblings, came up with the get-rich plan and is content to simply pocket a consulting fee. The new owners down there, Gary insists, are Russians, not mobbed-up Italians, and the shifting power structure could finally give their Jewish family an opening to earn extra dough. Hester (Scarlett Johansson), Irwin’s wife and the mother of their two teenage sons, is savvy enough to insist that they get paid in cash.

Everyone is in over their heads. That, you could already guess. Since his 1994 debut “Little Odessa,” Gray has continually spun stories about ordinary people mired in corruption. To him, it’s personal. In 1991, Gray’s own father, an electronics manufacturer also named Irwin, was indicted in a kickback scheme and punished with a fine and suspended sentence when the judge decided he was mostly guilty of being oblivious.

Gray’s films remain focused on what went wrong for his family. Yet, they’re implicitly about what’s gone awry in America: How did the upward trajectory that he grew up feeling entitled to get all squiggly? His last movie, 2022’s semi-autobiographical “Armageddon Time,” explored the inequalities of race and class in 1980s Queens while inserting a cameo of Fred Trump, a major donor at his own prep school. Here, “Paper Tiger’s” plotting is a little dull but its meticulous construction seems to look forward and backward all at once, opening with a distant image of the World Trade Towers, the roar of an unseen airplane and anticipatory strings that hint at what else those oil barrels chugging up and down the Gowanus will cost.

The lucrative opportunity that Driver’s Gary is dangling in front of his brother is dazzling — and clearly suspect from the late-night canal visits to the sizable paycheck for doing comparatively nothing. Teller’s Irwin isn’t greedy and he isn’t stupid, but it’s to his benefit not to ask that many questions. He’s an adamantly good guy and the way the film yanks on us is by asking if being a good guy also makes you an idiot. And Gray lays some of the blame for their family’s misfortune on his own surrogate, Scott, (Gavin Goudey), the older of Irwin’s boys, who hassles his parents to pony up for Lacoste polo shirts, a Mercedes Benz and a lavish 18th birthday party.

The normal way to tell this kind of story would be to have innocent Irwin investigate what else stinks down at the canal alongside the tar, sludge, arsenic and excrement. But Gray takes humanity’s grime as a given, gesturing towards it without wading into the details. When things go violently wrong, he’s more curious to observe the brothers’ naive assumptions that they can get out of their jam by obeying the rules as they understand them. One moment that makes us sit up straight comes when a Russian boss (Victor Ptak) makes an outrageous demand that Driver’s Gary agrees to instantly. Gary’s surprising acquiescence implies how much larger the threat is than he wants to let on — and, worse, it empowers the mobster to ask for more.

Driver wears the role of his ’80s hotshot as effortlessly as Drakkar Noir. His entrance scene is spectacular, barging into his brother’s home with an extravagant takeout steakhouse feast, waltzing Hester around the foyer, then wowing his nephews by making a joke of his concert piano skills and, more impressively, flashing them his gun. Gary is such an over-the-top charmer that the audience instantly guesses that he must be a little shady. To our confoundment, the script insists that Gary, now retired, was the rare honest NYPD officer — and, weirder still, acts like that was obvious.

Teller and Johansson, however, look like kids playing dress-up. Technically, both actors are old enough to play the parents of high schoolers, but today’s moisturized middle-age Hollywood star looks far more youthful than these characters would have 40 years ago. Plus, as good as Johansson is in her scenes, it’s simply distracting that her curly perm, dowdy blouses and Queens accent could have been swiped from a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

Working with the cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay, Gray proves smart with his budget, capturing the vastness of the Russian underground just in one shot of a near-empty Brighton Beach banquet hall. (The walls are decorated with a mural of a sparkling stream to contrast with the foul business taking place inside.) A noisy, pounding factory location adds natural tension to a stressful phone call; later, the best scene puts us in the POV of a predator skulking through the grass. Stylistically, “Paper Tiger” only goes overboard once with a rainstorm that shows up out of nowhere for bathos.

The film refuses to coalesce into a tidy, satisfying story. Irwin doesn’t tell Johansson’s Hester about his run-ins with the Russians for a while, which makes her sound inane when she lectures the boys about their dirty dishes around the house, like that’s the biggest problem they have. Meanwhile, Hester is fighting her own rapacious and unreasonable enemy in a parallel drama that never folds into the main plot. The one time Hester almost tells her family about it, her husband won’t shut up, so only we know her secret.

But ignorance is Gray’s entire point. This family’s last happy day will pass by without anyone knowing that it did. And while there’s a toxic allure to staying oblivious, these middle-class squares share more responsibility for everything terrible that happens than they’ll ever realize. We in the audience aren’t much different. We also want comfortable lives stocked with all the products the Gowanus Canal once provided — which means we, too, are guilty for its stench. Gray doesn’t slap that idea on the screen. But he hopes we’ll catch a whiff.

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