I loved James Gray’s Armageddon Time from the moment I first saw it at an early morning screening at the Telluride Film Festival. The film wrecked me for personal reasons I’ve recounted several times here on the site and in podcasts. In reality, I have little in common with James Gray, but his semi-autobiographical memory play touched me in ways few films this year have.
Yet, it wasn’t until I had the chance to meet him that I fully understood the depth of his connection to the film.
We were invited to attend a small gathering in Telluride to meet cast members and creative behind Focus Features’ Telluride selections. Gray attended and held court amongst the invited festival attendees. When I say “held court,” I mean that he truly entertained and educated with hours of personal stories from his experiences within the filmmaking world. He spoke of the Cannes Film Festival and of stories he’d heard about Gene Hackman and William Friedkin’s The French Connection. It was a wild and dizzying conversation, but I learned two things about James Gray that deeply enhanced my appreciation for Armageddon Time.
First, James Gray is a born storyteller. He boasts such an ease in translating that in-person jocular, freeform conversational style into brilliantly structured screenplays. Armageddon Time continues the near 20-year run of Gray adapting his own scripts for the screen, and his latest is his most successful yet. That makes sense, of course, since the story of Paul Graff (played by Banks Repeta) stems from Gray’s own troubled childhood. The brilliance of the Armageddon Time screenplay is that it employs the structure of a classic coming of age film to tell unspoken truths of America, more specifically middle-class white America, in the early 1980s. In interviews, Gray describes that period as the point where, in his opinion, things went dramatically downhill for the American socio-political culture. Whether or not that’s true can obviously be debated, but Armageddon Time’s final moments make a compelling argument reflecting Gray’s personal belief.
In the film’s final moments, Paul Graff escapes near-certain juvenile detention thanks to family connections and, mostly, the color of his skin. His best friend Johnny (the great Jaylin Webb) obviously will not share the same fate. We never see what happens to Johnny. Gray, himself, doesn’t know what happened to the real “Johnny” as they lost contact after the final events of the film. But we know the story. A young Black boy orphaned and incarcerated only has a handful of options in a white-dominated America. Whether its problematic or not (and I can understand those who see it as such), the film’s screenplay offers a shockingly blunt final moment between Paul and his father (Jeremy Strong) where their white privilege is fully acknowledged. Paul Graff escapes juvenile detention thanks to his station in life. Whether or not we as a modern film-going culture want to acknowledge it, the truth is there. White Americans have it easier than minorities then and today. It’s a sad, hopefully changing, state of affairs, and the brilliance of Armageddon Time’s screenplay is that it speaks this truth, reflecting it back to modern audiences as a moment when we approached a cultural armageddon on the advent of Reagan-era policies.
Gray closes the film with that hard hitting, vaguely nihilistic version of his vision for America, but until that point, the film soared with his deep, and deeply painful, exploration of his own family dynamics. That brings me to the second thing I learned about Armageddon Time from Gray himself during that Telluride gathering: the film really is a love letter to his grandfather, the glue that held their family together. As we talked about Anthony Hopkins’ brilliant performance, Gray pulled out his iPhone and showed me a picture of his grandfather, the spitting image of Anthony Hopkins. The fedora Hopkins wears in the film belonged to Gray’s own grandfather. Gray told me stories of his grandfather, deepening the already wonderful moments captured onscreen within the film.
Gray’s beautiful script captures the legacy of his family who escaped antisemitic persecution in Ukraine and the hopes for their future as channeled through Hopkins’ Aaron Rabinowitz. He lovingly supports his daughter Esther (Anne Hathaway) as she struggles to raise the willful Paul. He buys Paul’s way into a prestigious private school to ensure he takes advantage of that leg up that no one at that point openly acknowledged. He also uses this moment to set Paul up, hopefully, for a strong future in a world that he will no longer inhabit. When Hopkins’ Aaron passes, we feel James Gray’s loss, re-lived and expressed through this poignant film. But the film is not just an ode to his grandfather. It also serves to raise up the legacy of Gray’s own mother who he readily admits he terrorized through his pre-teen rampages, effectively ruining any opportunity for her to achieve success on her own as an elected member of the school board. Gray still regrets the negative impact his recklessness had on his mother’s chances at a career of her own. Gray’s mother died shortly after the events depicted in the film. I, for one, am glad he did not include that in the finished product. It would have been too painful to bear.
As writers, we’re often told to write what we know. It brings us closer to our truth. It makes our writing richer, deeper. With Armageddon Time, James Gray has written his finest script because he so graciously and openly shares the personal tragedies that shaped his life. The personal tragedies that informed the artist he is today. He also bravely uses his screenplay to acknowledge the divergent paths that he and his best friend “Johnny” would travel. Through Gray’s film, we think about “Johnny” and the missed potential he had to be great on his own. “Johnny’s” dreams were crushed by a white-dominated culture that did not consider him worthy of saving.
James Gray offers Armageddon Time as a testament not only to that tragedy but to a time where we could have changed it for the better and opted not to.
