James Gray’s Paper Tiger opened in select U.S. theaters Friday, Nov. 13, with a nationwide expansion scheduled for Nov. 20. Miles Teller and Adam Driver play brothers whose plans for a better life take them to the edge of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The canal’s long history of industrial dumping gives Gray’s fictional deal a real setting.
Where to see Paper Tiger
NEON’s cinema finder is the starting point for local bookings. The distributor lists Nov. 13 as the theatrical opening. The Associated Press and TheWrap report the Nov. 20 nationwide expansion. Individual cinemas can open it later. The Little Theatre in Rochester, New York, lists Nov. 25.
New York’s Angelika Film Center lists Paper Tiger in 35 mm. In Los Angeles, the Vista Theater lists multiple screenings through Thursday, Nov. 19, including 12:45, 4 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The feature runs 115 minutes and is rated R for language and some violence, according to the AP. The format can vary by venue, so look for the 35 mm label on the performance you choose.
Two brothers and a deal on the waterfront
Gray sets the film in 1986, in Queens and Brooklyn. Irwin, Teller’s character, is an engineer with a wife and two sons. Gary, played by Driver, is a former New York City cop who brings him into a deal involving industrial waste and the Gowanus Canal. According to Film at Lincoln Center’s festival program, Gary believes there’s money to be made by helping criminals work around regulations. Scarlett Johansson plays Irwin’s wife, Hester, who has a crisis of her own as the brothers’ dealings put the household at risk.
It’s familiar ground for Gray. He has made films about New York crime before, including The Yards and We Own the Night, both of which played in competition at Cannes. Paper Tiger also played in competition at Cannes in May, then opened the New York Film Festival in September. Film at Lincoln Center presented the opening-night screenings at Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater on 35 mm.
The real Gowanus Canal behind the story
The Environmental Protection Agency dates the canal’s completion to 1869, when Brooklyn and New York City were still separate cities. The 1.8-mile channel carried industrial traffic out to New York Harbor. Tanneries, mills, chemical plants and manufactured gas plants operated along it, and industrial discharges and sewer overflows contaminated the water and sediment over many years.
The EPA put the canal on its Superfund priority list in 2010, 24 years after the film is set. Its cleanup plan calls for dredging hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of contaminated sediment and placing a cap over the canal bed. In 1986, the year Gray chose for the story, the canal was still decades away from that federal cleanup. The EPA’s plan addresses the sediment under the water as well as what flows into it, including sewage that overflows during storms.
The New York films Gray picked for Queens
The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria is presenting films selected by Gray in James Gray’s New York, a series that continues after the museum’s Nov. 12 Paper Tiger preview. William Friedkin’s The French Connection screens Saturday, Nov. 14, at 4 p.m. Its celebrated car and elevated-train chase takes place in Brooklyn. The museum is showing it digitally in the Redstone Theater.
On Sunday, Nov. 22, at 1 p.m., the museum will show Anthony Mann’s Side Street on 35 mm in the Bartos Screening Room. Its protagonist is a part-time letter carrier who steals $30,000 and spends the rest of the film on the run through Manhattan. General admission for each screening is $17.50, plus $1.50 per ticket if purchased online.
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