Armageddon Time, a disenchanted look at conservatism in Regan’s America

Title: Armageddon Time – The time of the apocalypse

Original title: Armageddon Time

Director: James Gray

Country of production/year/duration: United States, 2022, 114 mins.

Performers: Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb, Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Sell, Andrew Polk, Tovah Feldshuh, John Diehl, Jessica Chastain, Jacob MacKinnon, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Domenick Lombardozzi, Dane West

Programming: Capitol Bergamo, UCI Cinemas Orio, UCI Cinemas Curno, Arcadia Stezzano, Treviglio Anteo spazioCinema

“If we let America be another Sodom and Gomorrah, maybe we could be the generation that sees Armageddon.” He words of Ronald Reagan, during the 1980 electoral campaign which, in the presidential elections, will see him win against Jimmy Carter. Words that resonate in the house of Paul Graff, the boy protagonist of Armageddon Time – The time of the apocalypsefilm directed by James Gray, in theaters from Thursday 23 March.

Paul (played by Banks Repeta) is a boy of Jewish origin who lives with his family in Queens, the largest borough of New York, with a strong immigrant component. Trying to get the attention of the class by drawing a caricature of a professor, he befriends African-American Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb). A solid bond is created between the two, until they are discovered smoking a joint in the school toilets: an event that becomes a watershed, “Armageddon” in the different destinies of Paul and Johnny.

The title of the film, which takes up the words spoken by Reagan, actually has a double meaning. The inspiration for the choice comes to the director from a reggae song called Armagidion Time, remade by The Clash in 1979. The threat of nuclear war that becomes, in a minor key, an event that marks Paul’s life. In fact, after the boy’s various exuberances, his parents decide to enroll him in the prestigious Kew-Forest School, created to train possible representatives of a future ruling class. Funder of the institute is Fred Trump (John Diehl, who plays the father of the future president of the United States) who, together with his daughter Maryanne (Jessica Chastain) will welcome the students with a lesson on commitment, which does not hide the cardinal principles of personal affirmation and success. Symbols of a capitalism based on the supremacy of the ego to which the figure of Aaron Graff (a splendid Anthony Hopkins), grandfather of the protagonist, acts as an ideal counterpart.

An immigrant to America from Eastern Europe, Aaron is a Ukrainian Jew (fleeing with his mother) who manages to build a new life in New York. Aware of the disparity in attitudes towards immigrants, he wishes the best possible for his family towards real social redemption (he will be the one to push Paul towards enrollment at Kew-Forset), but he does not forget the importance of fighting against injustices and in favor of respect for others. When Paul talks to his grandfather about the racist speeches of his new schoolmates, it will be Aaron who invites him to action, not to remain indifferent (“And what do you do when it happens?” – “I don’t do anything, it’s obvious” – “And Do you think you’re smart?”).

In Armageddon Time, James Gray shows a cruel but realistic face of America in the early 1980s, when social inequalities begin to be more evident and speeches aimed at the community leave room for personal affirmation. Disparities that are also evident between private and public schools and which manifest themselves in the already marked future of Johnny, a young African American without a family (he lives only with his elderly grandmother), whose wings and any hope in the future are immediately clipped, already indicated from birth as the only bearer of the evils of society. Opposite fate for Paul, a member of a family well integrated into society, despite his difficulties. His mother Esther (Anne Hathaway), representative of the parents, is a safe haven for the boy, while with his father Irving (Jeremy Strong) and his bourgeois respectability the relationship will always be complicated, underlined by the formal distance that always sees them as opposites of the shots chosen by the director.

Gray thus stages his stubborn and autobiographical version of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, a sort of The 400 strokes updated to the present day. Between historical memory and nostalgia, her childhood is shown through a coming of age simple and clear, never nostalgic, which from imagination and artistic inclination (the impressive photographic memory in reproducing a Kandinsky) arrives at the moment of personal growth through the assumption of responsibility. A responsibility that seems to coincide, however, with a Trumpian model, where lies prevail over a real awareness of one’s obligations. A lucid and disenchanted look that seems dangerously close to the Reagan prophecy.