Armageddon Time
Directed by James Gray
Running time: 1hr55 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Jaylin Webb and Banks Repeta star in Armageddon Time
Auteur cine-memoirs are all the rage at the moment. Joanna Hogg made hers in two brilliant parts; Paolo Sorrentino and Kenneth Branagh got Oscar attention for theirs; even Steven Spielberg, not known for his confessional intimacy as a filmmaker, is about to get in on the act. Good autobiography requires a certain amount of ego on the artist’s part, but also confidence that their story is about something bigger than their particular life path. James Gray’s gorgeous but surprisingly barbed Armageddon Time holds both those concerns in mind. A reflection on his early adolescence in suburban Queens, New York, in an America on the grim brink of the Reagan administration, it initially appears to be an exercise in cosy family nostalgia, blanketed in the rich autumnal hues of Darius Khondji’s cinematography. But then something happens — then another thing, and another — that sets its heartwarmer dial a few degrees off, framing Gray’s young, copper-mopped alter ego in an unexpectedly unflattering light, and dredging up complex, conflicting feelings of guilt and accountability, not rose-tinted affection.
Eleven-year-old Paul (Banks Repeta) is a difficult kid: friendless and distracted in class, and at home sometimes startlingly unpleasant to his parents (Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway, both excellent), he cultivates a dream of being a professional artist that is humored only by his gentle, patient grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins). At the start of a new school year, he finally finds an ally his age: hard-up, NASA-fixated Black pupil Johnny (Jaylin Webb), whose poverty Paul gauchely attempts to counter with offers of assistance. “My family is super-rich,” he brags of his firmly working-class New York Jewish household, and relative to Johnny, he may be right. But he has an awful lot to learn about America’s cruel socioeconomic hierarchy and his place in it; when his family, fearful for his future, pools their resources and bundles him off to an elite private school attended and sponsored by the Trump family, the penny begins to drop — and an attempt to ensure his one friend isn’t left behind takes a messy turn.
Thus does Armageddon Time lay out the foundation for both Reagan’s America and Trump’s decades-later version, while Gray wonders how he was shaped by it, and whether he could have done more, even at a tender age, to resist its conservative, discriminatory pull. It’s a piercing examination of privilege, dense with political nuance and question — yet it never feels like a screed, since its portrayal of family life is so honest and inhabited, with Hopkins’ lovely, careworn performance a little hearth of warmth at its centre. You might stop to wonder how Gray’s Ukrainian-by-way-of-Liverpool-by-way-of-Ellis-Island grandfather came by such a soothing Welsh accent, but it hardly matters: this jagged, generous film gives us more pressing matters to think and feel about.
ARMAGEDDON TIME (2022) Written by James Gray | Shot by Darius Khondji | Edited by Scott Morris
Selected for the Competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival