The best Adam Driver impresses the Cannes Festival

Special envoy to the Cannes Film FestivalFor fans of North American cinema that unites the narrative vigor of film genres and the authorial ambition of the seventies generation, this Sunday was an important day at the Cannes Film Festival, because a new film by James Gray, responsible for films like Two Lovers or Ad Astra and arguably the most underrated American director of recent decades, was presented. In France, however, critics and the public love him, and also at the Cannes Film Festival, which has screened with full honors Paper Tiger, a masterful drama about a New York family that, at the end of the summer of 1986, finds itself unexpectedly in the crosshairs of the dangerous Russian mafia.

The origin of the problem lies in the business dealings that Gary, the ambitious and successful ex-policeman played by Adam Driver, has with these mafiosi. Gary doesn't explain to his brother, an engineer (Miles Teller), who the Russians really are when he recruits him to set up a consulting firm; Irwin doesn't quite see it clearly, but trust in his brother and the prospect of easy money add to his frustration at not having climbed higher on the social ladder, and he accepts the proposal without knowing that he is endangering his wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), and their two teenage children.

Paper tiger, a title that ironically plays on Irwin's description of gangsters and the slogan that discredited the United States in communist countries, is inscribed in the great tradition of 1970s crime cinema, from which Gray's films have always drawn, but here with a very personal and down-to-earth dimension. “The world of the film is the world I grew up in – the director has explained–. These are experiences I've had directly or indirectly, things I've lived through. And my life is not a Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola movie.”

The thematic elements Gray works with are similar to those of his early thrillers, Little Odessa, The yards or The Night Is Ours: family as a space of salvation and perdition, insurmountable moral dilemmas, bonds tested by forces beyond our control... However, in Paper tiger there is a tenderness and intimacy that connects it very much with his previous film, Armageddon time, which was also set in the eighties. The choice of era is not accidental at all. “During the eighties, the changes began that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and China's opening to markets, an event that left the capitalist system without a counterbalance –explains Gray–. This had a devastating impact on our souls: in today's world, integrity cannot be monetized, so being a good person has lost its appeal, especially for young people. Why be a good person if no one will reward you? The current president of the United States is a symptom of this.”

An Al Pacino of six feet three inches

A sense of doom runs through the images of Paper tiger from the beginning of the film, in which Gray once again demonstrates that he is one of the directors who best films New York and a gifted planner of suspenseful scenes. But the heart of the film here is the relationship between Irwin and Gary. Between the two there is a fraternal love that is reflected in the self-destructive mirror of Harvey Keitel and Robert de Niro in Mean streets, although Adam Driver's imposing performance primarily brings to mind a six-foot-three version of the best Al Pacino: dangerous, charismatic, contradictory, and tragically human. Driver's always-at-volume-eleven energy finds a perfect vehicle in his character to channel itself, resulting in one of his best roles in cinema, well accompanied by a Teller who offers his most fragile and nuanced performance.

At a press conference, Driver downplayed his creative contribution, giving all the credit to Gray. "I didn't have to work much because the script was so clear and specific that nothing else needed to be added," he explained. "I just had to follow the key that James gave me: all of Gary's decisions are based on his love for his brother." Driver also dodged a question about the portrayal Lena Dunham makes of him in her recent memoirs, where she describes outbursts of violence involving the actor. "I won't make any comments, I'm saving it all for my book," Driver joked.

Scarlett Johansson, who is filming the remake of The Exorcistthe portrait that Lena Dunham paints of herself in her recent memoir