“You can’t ever forget about the past,” Anthony Hopkins says with gentle heed and caution, in a key moment in writer/director James Gray’s intimate new film, “Armageddon Time,” a compassionate movie in perpetual contemplation of our collective accounts, both personally, socially and historically. After venturing out into the jungle (“The Lost City Of Z”), exploring the unfathomable unknowns of deep space (“Ad Astra”) and coming to the same conclusions about the dark heart of human nature, Gray returns to the pavement of his New York City roots for one of his most emotionally honest works regarding the elemental moments of life, love and loss.
Free of the Trojan Horse trappings of genre he so often and expertly employs to examine the human condition, “Armageddon Time,” has little to hide behind. Thus, the film’s a much more minor-keyed, a quieter and more humanist affair, but it’s a stronger work for it. Layered in its preoccupations—about class, the fallacy of the American Dream, and the struggle to sustain its illusion— it’s also a ruthlessly self-examining look at privilege, what it engenders, what it unbearably excludes, and its bruising costs.
Set in the public school system of 1980s Queens, New York—one of Gray’s favorite settings, but one he hasn’t visited in many years—the semi-autobiographical, but fictionalized tale centers on a young Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) and his extended working-class Jewish-immigrant family, including his beloved grandfather (Anthony Hopkins), the gentle and wise patriarch of his family.
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A budding young artist, but a first-rate daydreamer with his head in the clouds, Paul grapples with much of the inconsequential matters most blissfully unaware sixth-graders wrestle with: annoying siblings, overbearing parents, and their collective interests, in either sports, music, arts, or all of the above. During the beginning of the school year, Paul finds himself drawn to fellow class clown, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a bright Black kid repeating the grade, but seemingly too smart and bored to buy what the teachers are selling.
As their friendship grows and the bonds strengthen, a misdemeanor troublemaking incident between them spooks his already-concerned parents, fretting about the overcrowded public school system—Esther (Anne Hathaway) and Irving (Jeremy Strong)— and they soon ship him from PS-173 to Kew-Forest, an elite private school where Fred Trump, Sr. is one of the main donors (though they can barely afford it). Estranged in his alien new prep school, its all-white classrooms, its subtle and not-so-subtle prejudices, and its exclusive concerns, Paul soon finds himself at a turning point while starring down the possibility of losing those he loves most, including his best friend Johnny.
With its concrete jungle milieu, graffiti-etched logo, and its music (The Clash, Sugarhill Gang), “Armageddon Time” has a low-key veneer of ‘80s nostalgia, but it never overwhelms. Named after the socially-conscious Clash song “Armagedion Time,” itself a cover of the famous reggae song by Willie Williams about suffering and inequities, both the song’s motif and its white appropriation of black culture is thematically sound as much of the film seems to be a mature consideration of what Gray was too young, oblivious and privileged to understand at the time.
In that regard, if a wave of films influenced by #MeToo film has already arrived (“Promising Young Women” et al.), “Armageddon Time” is arguably a film influenced by the post Age of Empathy™ era. Nuance is needed for any such conversations here because in the hands of the bad faith crowd, that distorts into one of the first “woke,” post-White Guilt era movies. But that’s unfair and reductive as Gray applies an empathetic lens to each and every scene, culturally pointed or otherwise.
Take for example, a spanking scene with a belt. Told from Paul’s perspective, what used to be a normal occurrence for many kids of the 1980s is seen for what is really is— not just as seen today— a vicious and cruel act of violence that no child should ever endure. It’s that kind of holistic reconsideration of the past that Gray is interrogating throughout. And in that sense, taken in its totality, there’s a whole lot of grief and dolor in the film about how we used to be treated and how casually cruel we used to treat others.
It’s also in this moment—in the beginning of Paul’s school troubles—where the film’s leisurely pace switches into a more active gear. Gray’s always been terrific at making small-scaled dramatic situations—relative to bigger films anyhow—feel larger than life. If you can reflect on any moment in adolescence that felt like your personal world was ending— even if it feels small in retrospect, but you still understand its enormity—Gray places you there, crafting emotional stakes that feel bruising and like an oncoming catastrophe of epic proportions.
Gray’s most political film, but political in the humanist sense (Toni Morrison once said all good art is political and she’s not wrong), clearly all the ugliness that the Trump era stirred up in America also roused something in the filmmaker. Jessica Chastain appears in a nice surprise cameo as Maryanne Trump delivering a speech to students about American exceptionalism, but it’s peppered with unpleasant notions of a world-is-yours-for-the-taking culture clearly only afforded to the rich and affluent.
The cast all offer exemplary work, including the great Anthony Hopkins as the warmhearted grandpa and moral compass of the movie. Fans of the filmmaker and his affable, menschy, Noo Yawk sensibilities will also likely be particularly amused by Jeremy Strong, essentially playing a sendup of an older Gray without falling into caricature. But there is no movie without the heart and soul and perceptive inner lives of Repeta and Webb. Much like the movie in its greatest moments—sincerely touching, gut-wrenching, and tragic— both boys, who surely have super promising careers ahead of them, break your hearts.
Coming-of-age in shape, flecked with some of the warm and humorous romanticism of Francois Truffaut and Fellini, the film is also a coming-of-awareness movie and goodbye to youth; the cruel, disillusioning realities of life will forever taint the purity of adolescence.
Gray’s a longtime Francis Ford Coppola acolyte, and while his film and its concerns are largely different, this aesthetic influence still shows. Returning to the chiaroscuro palette of “The Yards,” Daris Khondji plays with shadows, light, and soft ambered hues that would make Gordon Willis proud. Gray’s longtime composer Christopher Spellman’s simple, sorrowful guitar fingerpicking work is also affecting, but the plaintive notes he hits are reminiscent of some of the dolor found in “The Godfather.”
“Armageddon Time” feels autumnal in the John Updike sense of the word (“these days on the verge of winter were autumnally fair, struck through with warmth until the swift lengthening of the shadows”) and if the film slips up anywhere, it’s in its baggy first act which can feel a little plotless. Perhaps some of the “do the right things” earnestness of Hopkins’ character, the romantically too-perfect, too-virtuous grandfatherly qualities are too sentimentalized, or too on the nose, but as a movie steeped in the fondness and sadness of memory, it’s hard to fault.
A deeply personal film, with Gray memorializing his youth, warts and all, “Armageddon Time” is full of goodbyes— for the wise grandfathers we cherished, for the friends who are surely lost to time, and the innocence of a youth that’s never quite the same when it must reckon with the harsh truths of survival in a dog-eat-dog society filled with bias, fear, and selfish instincts towards self-preservation.
Wistfully looking back on the past with a mix of affection for those we have lost, a melancholy yearning for the more tender age of innocence, and anxiety and regret for our trespasses, Gray’s stripped-down drama is a clear-eyed and emotionally intelligent work of great empathy. [B+]
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