Armageddon Time

Absorbing and poignant, casually didactic and deeply personal, James Gray’s Armageddon Time ends up being as engaging as it is uneven and glum. A fictionalized look at the filmmaker’s childhood and family during 1980 is involving, at times amusing, other times heartbreaking. The film eventually gets bleak in the second half of the film’s running time; Gray’s personal framework becomes a self-autobiographical portrait of a specific childhood about painful memories where James Gray is attempting to atone for past guilt through his art.

After the visionary and highly ambitious period pieces of The Lost City of Z and The Immigrant, Gray returns to a more intimate and familiar Queens neighborhood, where most of Gray’s films are shot. This gives his films an insider perspective that feels vivid. Serving as producer, writer, and director, Gray’s film is certainly a personal project that explores family life and delivers a lot of subtext and sincere emotion well into the film’s final scenes. Memory is certainly examined and evoked, and the feeling of guilt that Gray must have felt or holds in the modern world is quite telling. Even if it might not hit on all levels, there is a level of maturity and grace to be found in Gray’s eighth feature.

Set during the beginning of the Reagan years, in the fall of 1980, the film’s protagonist is 11-year-old Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), who is fresh into middle school as a sixth grader. What hints at being a beguiling and offbeat coming-of-age story where Paul is somewhat of an outsider at school. He dazes off in class and prefers to sketch up illustrations rather than listen to boring instructors. Sadly, the film also drifts into a heavy-handed progressive film that ends up taking the film into a completely different terrain.

The film’s title, which is the name of a dub reggae cover by the Clash, is featured in the film, and we often hear Ronald Reagan in TV clips referencing “Armageddon” in his political speeches.  The film follows Paul, and we see the film from his perspective during the course of his journey. We see him confined to his upbringing with his Jewish family, which often holds heated debates at family dinners, which causes the food to get cold and causes Paul to order takeout Chinese. The opening of the film offers a lot of offbeat humor, which you can easily sense as deadpan humor like the kind P.T. Anderson offered about the Kane household in Licorice Pizza.

The film opens up with Paul on his first day of 6th grade. His teacher, the befuddled Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Taulb), stands for no nonsense in his class. It’s in this particular moment where Paul gets caught drawing a cartoon caricature that gets passed around throughout the class. This catches the attention of the teacher and leads to Paul admitting that he is the creator of the illustration. Paul’s penalty is to stand and serve as an assistant to Mr. Turkeltaub. Paul ends up making friends with Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a fellow class clown who was held back a year and who also gets under the teachers’ skin because he gets outwitted by him. Johnny is constantly graded in 1980s America by Mr. Turkeltaub’s racism, which is both micro and macro aggressive. Both Johnny and Paul become close friends in the course of a few weeks, and while the kids both get into trouble together for doing very mild delinquent things, Johnny and Paul have different outcomes in their discipline due to their differences in race and class.

Even though Johnny comes from a single parent household where he lives with his ailing grandma, Paul ends up buying Johnny’s field trip ticket and says he comes from a “superrich” family in which his family is a working-class family that gets assistance through his grandparents, who help support Paul’s older brother to attend a private preparatory school. Paul is certainly the outsider in the family; even at age 11, he always feels the outside pressures of building a career and finding interests outside of his passion for his art.

Paul’s family consists of his grandparents, who have stories of escaping Europe just before the Holocaust but warn about the constant threat of anti-Semitism. Paul’s mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), is often the hyperactive PTA president who has goals to run in the school board elections, and Paul’s father, Irving (Jaremy Strong), is a water heater repairman who seems like a sensible father unless his temper bursts out. There is a grueling scene of Irving punishing Paul after being suspended from school. Both Hathaway and Strong embody their roles well, and they both have some deeply empathetic moments where they get under your skin one moment only for them to both redeem themselves the next. In the end, they are certainly loving and caring parents whose anxieties about wanting the best interest for their children are constructed by the outside world, which wants everyone to be consumers and servants to the capitalist system before enjoying other privileges life has to offer.

Paul’s family, the Grafs, appear to be liberals; they all rally against Ronald Reagan’s election and refer to him as an awful governor, and many of them have their own share of grievances about being oppressed. Yet they all refer to Black Americans as “The Blacks” who fear they are going to move into the schools, and Paul’s grandmother advocates that Paul go to the private school that holds even more separatism within society. The only character in the film who isn’t a wishy washer is Paul’s grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), a Ukrainian-English immigrant who has witnessed the worst kind of oppression. He ends up encouraging Paul to stay true to his talents and skills as an artist, and he warns Paul just how cruel and unfair the world can be, but the best antidote is to constantly combat it.

Once Paul and Johnny are caught smoking a joint in the bathroom, The Grafs immediately get support from the grandparents to enroll Paul in the same private school his brother attends. On Paul’s first day, we see a man loom over the long hallways. We assume he’s the principal of the school where it’s revealed that it’s actually Fred Trump (John Diehl) — the father to Donald Trump — who ends up being a guest along with this daughter Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain) at the school’s assembly. During the Reagan years is when two Americas started to shift from the privileged and elite one. Paul is just a 12-year-old artist, and he’s being lectured on where he needs to get into finance, business, and politics. Paul is essentially trapped in a corrupt system that is systematically responsible for the neglect that his close friend Johnny suffers from.

It’s a noble gesture on Gray’s part to draw the connections between the dawn of the Reagan era and how it paved the way for Trumpism. While both children get into trouble, it’s Johnny who gets the raw end of the deal due to his social status and race. Sadly, the film becomes heavy-handed liberal sermonizing that doesn’t quite reach the poignant impact it could have in just how underwritten Johnny’s character becomes. Once the boys drift apart, Johnny is shortchanged in the narrative and is only brought in to elevate Paul’s arc and to find Gray’s own atonement for the possible burdens he holds. The narrative uses him more as a device for redemption than as a fully fleshed-out character. Sure, there is a moving scene of him hugging his ailing grandma, but the narrative could have easily used 10-15 minutes more of Johnny’s character that would have pulled it away from being routine progressive posturing.

Despite its flaws and shortcomings, Armageddon Time is a commanding effort that eventually eclipses the didacticism. There are many scenes in the film that ring true, and like in Gray’s previous films, bleakness and harsh realities unfortunately do prevail. But the film is redeemed with so many poignantly scripted and powerfully rendered scenes. Each scene with Hopkins is delivered with great sincerity and drama, which brings urgency to the film’s core themes and principles. On a visual and technical level, Armageddon Level excels. Cinematographer Darious Kondji carries on Gray’s aesthetics that date back to Little Odessa, The Yards, and Two Lovers, which consist of mostly muted colors and grays that give the film a cloudy, worn-out look where the augmented camera work gives it a ghostly and transportive feel.

Ultimately, Gray’s eighth feature is certainly capable of resonating even more, it’s his personal vision where its great intentions do ignite, and its heart is in the right place. Most importantly, Gray’s vision becomes a saga of harsh and brutal truths about America. Gray examines the melting pot origins of our dehumanizing political discourse in pre-Reagan America, which can certainly be viewed as a precursor to where we are today.