Film Review - Armageddon Time
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures Australia.
One of the most consequential ideas in Armageddon Time, director James Gray’s deeply personal new film, is that of the accessibility of privilege. The existence of such accessibility, it could be said, is the American Dream: that it’s a country – the country – where anyone, from anywhere, can ‘make it’. As depicted here, however, ‘making it’ means gaining access to the kind of prosperity that is propped up by its exclusivity. At its most essential, the film is a story of a young Jewish boy who befriends a Black boy, and the confusing strata of privilege and injustices that come to define his place in late-20th-Century America.
That boy is the eleven-year-old Paul Graff, clearly something of a stand-in for James Gray himself, who grew up in Flushing, New York as the grandchild of Russian Jewish immigrants, their name changing from Greyzerstein as they passed through the immigration centre at Ellis Island. Like Gray was, Paul is a student in the New York City public education system: an initial titlecard places us in ‘PS 173, 1980’. The scene that follows gives us everything we need to understand the film ahead.
The cinematic rendering of a sixth-grade classroom is vividly remembered, but lacking an ounce of nostalgia or sentimentality. We see Paul reprimanded for a caricature of his teacher, to which his simultaneously meek and insolent response is that he just wanted to make the other kids laugh. Paul can be a troublemaker. What’s also noticeable, though, is the way his teacher comes down even harder on his Black classmate, Johnny, who defiantly backs him up. He and Paul become fast friends, bonding over their pipe dreams: Paul wants to be an artist, and Johnny a NASA astronaut. In what is unquestionably not a particularly plot-heavy film – the narrative unfurls as a series of moments and memories with common themes – the main thrust of the story becomes Paul’s estrangement from Johnny, and the forces that drive it underpin everything Gray has on his mind here.
One day, the two are caught trying weed together in the bathrooms. It’s a seismic event for Paul: his mother (Anne Hathaway, projecting stern, loving exhaustion) is called in to speak with the principal, and she is so disturbed by the incident that she not only instigates moving Paul to his older brother’s private school, but she stops the heretofore-defiant Paul in his tracks with one line: “your father’s going to deal with you”. Gray shoots the next sequence like a horror film. With a knuckle-whitening push-in on Paul’s terrified face, his father’s rage is unleashed. A character who elsewhere in the film gives tender lessons to his boys, or charmingly wakes them up singing and banging pots and pans, is rendered monstrous as he belts the bawling Paul - the always-excellent Jeremy Strong injects each moment with equal authenticity. The character’s contradictions are a clear-eyed statement about the time in which Gray grew up.
The lasting consequence of the weed incident turns out to be the change of school. Paul’s extended family – including his grandparents and great aunt and uncle – are all adamant that the next generation must “get a real seat at the table”, and that means slicking back his unruly hair, putting on the blazer and tie, and stepping into an entirely different world. That the Graffs can afford this isn’t really a central issue – they seem to be comfortably middle-class – it’s their background that serves as both the impetus and chief obstacle for Paul’s private-school ascension. The spectre of anti-Semitic violence in the Old World hangs heavy over this immigrant family, but the generational trauma also manifests in a fixation on socio-economic mobility: assimilation into whiteness, and more specifically white privilege, will give Paul the leg-up he needs to carry the hopes of his loved ones. At this new school, however, he’s almost immediately sniffed out by a glib, sneering old financial donor who turns out to be none other than Fred Trump: “what kind of name is Graff, anyway?”.
In this new environment, Paul’s position feels as precarious as Johnny’s did at his old school. In the quietly perceptive way of a child, he verbalises to a school counsellor his fear that he’ll accidentally let something slip that ostracises him from his new classmates. They toss around the N-word with such a lack of deliberate bluster or showmanship that it’s clear this prejudice – learned from their parents – is utterly ubiquitous.
One of Gray’s most impressive touches, though, is the critical eye he directs on Paul’s own family, in turn. These are not right-wing monsters: they shake their heads at Reagan’s landslide 1980 election victory (“morons”, mutters Strong), and the reason Paul was kept at PS 173 for so long was his PTA-president mother’s lingering faith in the public education system.
Nonetheless, the ‘life’s not fair’ resilience Paul’s parents impart on him extends to a shrugging ‘life’s not fair’ lack of sympathy for those they perceive as beneath them. Gray rightly doesn’t try to imagine Johnny’s life (Paul cannot truly know him, and so neither can he), but he’s careful to give us enough – among other things, the fact that Johnny’s sole guardian is his ailing Grandmother – to remind us that Johnny is more than just the “some Black boy sneaking around outside” that Paul’s mother mentions when telling him to make sure to lock their doors. Indeed, the weed incident is shown to be particularly upsetting to Paul’s parents when they learn the student with whom he was smoking was Black.
The only family member who seems wary of practising the same bigotry they all fear is Paul’s grandfather Aaron, as whom Anthony Hopkins gives the best performance in the movie. Aaron is the picture of doting grandfatherly warmth, and Hopkins’ tripping, musical spoken cadence is perfectly endearing. Like all the family, his history and experience of the world has given him strong convictions about how to find prosperity, but for him it never comes at the cost of his values. “Fuck ‘em… you’ve gotta say something, be a mensch”, he says when Paul tells him of the racism he sees at his new school. It’s just as lucky, because he seems to be the only one his rebellious grandson listens to.
Sometimes when Paul goes to bed, we hear voices, things characters have said to him – the conflicting messages he’s receiving about the world, and his place in it. Aaron’s voice is one, and it’s an incredibly touching one, but he also hears Johnny, unconvincingly blasé about being held back with the special-needs kids, or a charismatic assembly guest speaker at his new school telling the crowd of privileged students that they will inherit the world.
This is how that ‘accessibility of privilege’ idea drives the film. Paul’s family are clearly a (sobering) portrait of American immigrant families in the early 80s – their life is entirely subject to unspoken laws of class and ethnicity that shaped their history; and they’re not immune to the kinds of “fuck you, got mine” ambition that characterises those who sit above them in the American social hierarchy. Gray isn’t damning anyone, nor is he absolving anyone – least of all himself. His remarkable honesty always wins out, he is just generous: generous to all of these characters and their failings. He has taken his own life experience and made a coming-of-age film full of complexities, full of questions that challenge even the most assured adults. Watching a twelve-year-old boy like Paul navigate this world is not always easy, but it’s tremendously meaningful and surprisingly involving. The climax of that Paul-and-Johnny storyline which comes to occupy the centre of the film is devastating, as is the entire film, taken in its totality – and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Armageddon Time is screening in cinemas from Thursday 3rd of November. For tickets and more info, click here.