CANNES, France (AP) — James Gray has been to the Cannes Film Festival enough times to not entirely trust the response his films get here, for better or worse.“You smile and say thank you and then you fly home and your wife says take out the garbage,” says Gray.Nevertheless, Gray’s “Paper Tiger” has been one of the standouts of this year’s Cannes. And at the center of the warm reception for “Paper Tiger” — which premiered Saturday and is one of only two films by American filmmakers competing for the Palme d’Or — is Miles Teller.
When you have no ability to monetize integrity, good behavior becomes a meaningless factor in a transactional world.
James Gray, director
The 39-year-old actor stars in the film as Irwin Pearl, an earnest family man in 1980s New York, living contentedly with his wife (Scarlett Johansson) and two sons. After Irwin’s well-connected, former police officer brother (Adam Driver) gets them involved in a scheme related to cleaning up the Gowanus Canal, Russian mafia threats put their working-class life under siege.
Gray initially conceived of the film as a kind of sequel to 2022’s “Armageddon Time,” with Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong. But when circumstances changed, he reworked the script, made it more operatic and focused on the brother relationship.
