In an era where every other director seems to be making their own autobiographical version of Roma, James Gray isn’t here just to pay tribute to a parent or family member. There’s a lot of love given throughout Armageddon Time, but there’s also a lot of pain inflicted by those giving that same love. This complicated, cathartic portrait of the American family doubles as a searing critique of the country’s ideologies, economics, and overall organization, showing how oppression trickles down and results in hidden wars between various marginalized groups.
Set in 1980 as Ronald Reagan embarks on his presidential campaign, the film follows the Graff family in Queens, New York, starting with young Paul (Banks Repeta) on his first day of sixth grade. After getting in trouble for doodling his new teacher, he befriends Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a Black student the same teacher held back a year the previous spring. It’s immediately clear, as the teacher continues to blame and antagonize Johnny, that racial bias has infected this classroom and thus the whole school system, limiting Johnny’s learning and overall opportunities.
Still, Paul and Johnny make fast friends, as both kids gleefully march to the beat of their own drum. Eventually, they end up getting caught smoking a joint in the school bathroom. Paul’s parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) react angrily and forcefully, sending him to a private school run by Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain in a small but effective cameo), sister of, well, you know who.
Gray’s script is specific in how it draws each of Paul’s relationships, starting with the purity of a new young friendship. Paul is sympathetic to and likely on some small level understanding of the discrimination leveled at Johnny. The Graffs are a practicing Jewish family, and Paul’s grandparents routinely relay the horrors done to their people over the family dinner table. It surprises Paul, then, that his family can be so cruel about Johnny after the pair got in trouble. All his mother seems to see is the “Black boy” who lit a joint with her son, even though we had previously been introduced to a caring, thoughtful woman.
These racial aggressions only get more pronounced at the new private school, to the point where they start to seep into Paul’s persona. Luckily, Armageddon Time is a smarter story than a detailed account of a how a young Jewish kid becomes racist. Among the family’s ranks is Grandpa Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), a kind old soul with which Paul shares a special kinship. A man of his generation, Aaron isn’t immune to airing out the occasional outdated viewpoint or falling into the Americanism of putting a metaphorical bandage on deeper wounds (“You’ll be okay, kid,” Aaron flippantly says after agreeing with his parents to help push Paul under the tutelage of Maryanne Trump). But this family patriarch is still brimming with empathy and encouragement, hopeful that Paul will follow his artistic passions while also stern in his advice to stand up and be vocal in the face of prejudice against anyone, after Paul tells him of students at his new school dropping the N-word.
Ultimately, this film is a rallying cry to fight against how we as Americans are taught to suppress our own truths and the truths of those around us. Gray understands how segregation never really went away thanks to the U.S.’s religious devotion to capitalism. In Armageddon Time, he’s grappling with the very real ways that sneaks into or even defines a family’s inter-relationships, no matter their background. He wants us to wake up to how everyone is contributing to an unequal society.
On top of it all, the performers all bring their best. Repeta and Webb’s adolescent chemistry is magnetic, and when separate, they both hold their own, even if Repeta runs away with the film, practically ensuring a long, fruitful career in his wake. Of the adults, Hathaway gives the most to her role, every one of her expressions unveiling a fresh wrinkle of emotional complexity toward the material of the scene. Strong, meanwhile, proves brilliant while so far removed from his work on Succession. And then there’s Hopkins, effortlessly showing us why his name is synonymous with the craft.
Together, the ensemble brings Gray’s script to life with a natural clarity that often enough blurs the illusion of the cinema. This story and its characters are so wholly engrossing that the film’s one-hour-and-55-minute runtime races by. It’s effective family drama that lives in the cracks of society, which, since 1980, have only gotten more pronounced. The familial and societal pressures that dig their way into the Graffs are exactly what threaten their own morality. What Armageddon Time so beautifully and articulately illustrates is that the ways love is often taught and passed down cannot mend the American infection. It’s time for another way.
