James Gray part of his childhood to tell a story of ‘coming of age’ in Reagan’s America. Social injustices, sincere feelings and a supporting cast of luxury: Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong
Armageddon Time – The time of the apocalypse by James Gray, just released at the cinema, is a film about New York (particularly Queens) and childhood (inspired by that of the director himself). It’s the 1980s and Paul (Banks Repeta) is a redheaded middle-school boy raised by loving if “defective” parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) and a Holocaust-surviving grandfather whom he adores (Anthony Hopkins). He is a good boy full of good intentions. He listens to the stories his grandfather tells him with sincere curiosity. Sometimes it makes his father angry, but he always regrets it.
Armageddon Time largely tells of what happens after Paul befriends a black classmate, Johnny (Jaylin Webb); a friendship made complicated by both their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. It’s the Reagan decade. It is the era where the nation is trying to convince that every citizen has an equal chance to succeed. One of the tragedies of the world that Armageddon Time stages is the feeling that some people, taking these words literally, end up desperately taking the bait.
But the film doesn’t need to explain all of this to us, it just stages it. Johnny lives with his grandmother and comes from a poor family. Paul’s family, on the other hand, is trying in every way to make the economic leap. Indeed, the money is the responsibility of Paul and his brother, who are destined to study, graduate and find a position that guarantees the support of their parents and grandparents (with all the economic chaos this model has caused in the late 20th century). The task of the children of immigrant families is to finally make all the sacrifices of their parents count.
While the job of adults would be to understand the world in ways that kids are too young to adopt. One of the major (and implicit) tensions at the heart of Armageddon Time it is the gap between the resentful understanding of adults and the impulsive sincerity of children. The film tells the weight caused by the sense of shame, which soon becomes a sense of guilt. But there is something even more desperate in the drama that Gray gives to his work. White guilt is taking one’s ethnic privilege for granted. You do it without even thinking about it. You haven’t earned it, and you don’t know what it’s like to earn it. Shame at the heart of Armageddon Time it’s that of an adult looking back, and now seeing all the blatant evidence that the upside of being white has resulted in the downsides of others – in this case, kids like Johnny.
On the surface, the drama it tells Armageddon Time it is very clear and straightforward. Paul fools around, gets into trouble and always gets away with it, under the eye of parents who seem very worried about their son’s recklessness. They expect a bright future from this son, which means, among other things, stifling his dreams of being an artist, sending him to a “better” school, and seeing him grow into one of those young men who put gel in their hair and go walking around with a briefcase.
The film tells a lot of things, but above all it investigates the “racial” upbringing of a Jewish teenager. Gray, working on the basis of obvious autobiographical material, understands what Paul did not understand. He knows how things will turn out when Johnny loses the house where he lives and Paul, who simply wants to help him as a friend, takes him into the shed behind his house without telling his parents. And he knows what will happen when Paul is sent to an all-white private school (precisely because that school is “all white”) from parents who obviously would never call themselves racist.
Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong in a scene from the film. Photo: Focus Features
There is a mix of what we know and what we don’t yet know, sentimental and otherwise. No one will miss the irony of the scene where Paul and his classmates are sitting in school listening to the success stories of men like a certain Trump. But scenes like this are there to tell us that that political and economic logic, in a certain era, was incredibly seductive. Indeed, even aspirational. Armageddon Time it speaks precisely of these fractures, of these choices. Of the decisions a Jewish family makes only because they feel they are the right ones; and people left behind because that’s the way it has to be.
This is not Gray’s first analysis of the white community of suburban New York. Little Odessa (1994) was set in Brighton Beach; The Yards (2000) in the Bronx; Once upon a time in New York (2013) took us to Ellis Island. Gray was born in Flushing. He can be sentimental, which is the risk of classic melodrama. And he is no stranger to the risk of feelings sinking into nostalgia. The family is one of the main themes of his cinema. The same is true here, not only because it’s clear that it’s all part of the director’s personal experience, but also because of his actors. Jeremy Strong is brilliant as the strict father with a clear purpose in mind; a man moved by fear but also by desperation. Hathaway is also very good and convincing in the role of a mother whose even the most difficult choices seem to have no justification. Hopkins as usual towers as a grandfather who always has a twinkle in his eye, a man capable of unconditional love even in the face of a world that constantly seems to want to shut down that love.
But the key performance is that of Jaylin Webb, in a role that has been criticized for being too minor compared to the others: a criticism that has its foundation, but which does not detract from the depth of the character (and its interpreter). The pure and simple fact – and also in some uncomfortable ways – is that, as one black and the other Jewish, neither Johnny nor Paul are white enough, privileged enough. And they both feel all this. But one has the opportunity to do something to redeem himself; the other remains collateral damage to the system.
Anthony Hopkins with Banks Repeat. Photo: Focus Features
The most poignant element in Webb’s performance is the ability to make Johnny a kid savvy enough to understand the world, but still, precisely, a kid who ends up acting completely naive. He does things he shouldn’t do, and not because they’re wrong in themselves, but because the risks for him aren’t the ones his friend Paul would incur. The movie almost makes you wish Johnny could live in a world that gives him the right to make mistakes, which the era he was born into doesn’t allow him.
Armageddon Time it works because it hurts. The shame behind the camera is palpable. It’s shocking how the film manages to hold together a perfect family drama until the end, when its political message becomes inevitable and the pain of this search for identity rings loud and clear. Privilege, as this film tells us, is really about power. Armageddon Time it’s not a film that wants to line up good guys and bad guys. It’s just a movie about people, and that makes it all the more shocking. And he doesn’t want to justify people’s choices. But he knows he can’t even change them.
From Rolling Stone US