How Scarlett Johansson’s mob movie ‘Paper Tiger’ avoided ’80s ‘parody’

NEW YORK – “Paper Tiger” isn’t your average slice of ‘80s nostalgia.

Legwarmers and Rubik’s cubes went out the window in James Gray’s elegiac crime drama, which opened the New York Film Festival Sept. 25 ahead of its release in theaters Nov. 13.

Instead, the writer-director takes a relatively subdued approach to the decade, as he follows a pair of brothers, Gary (Adam Driver) and Irwin (Miles Teller), who get mixed up with the Russian mob in late 1980s Queens, New York.

The film features career-best work from Driver and especially Teller, who scrambles to protect his teenage sons and wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson), who is privately facing battles of her own. Johansson goes big with a thick accent and voluminous curls, although she reins in her performance for the movie’s poignant last half hour.

“Paper Tiger” is semi-autobiographical for Gray, 66, who grew up in New York and tried to capture a snapshot of the city he once knew.

Now, “it looks nothing like it did in 1986,” Gray said Sept. 25 at a midday festival press conference, where he was joined by Driver and Teller. “People dress nothing like that, the hair with these perms. My mother had…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/entertainment/