"Armageddon Time," Gray's eighth feature film, marks a break from most of what he has done before. It's a more personal project: an autobiographical coming-of-age memoir film set in 1980 Queens, New York, and stars an 11-year-old hero, Paul Graff, navigating sixth grade and the wider. world that begins to feed it. It is a skillful, demanding and seductive film. But Gray's other film, in this case an overbearing progressive instructive, is also on the way.
“Armageddon Time,” which takes its title from a dub reggae cover by The Clash released in 1979, is strikingly different in tone from Gray's other work. Set primarily among children, and also in the home of Paul's scruffy and combative Jewish family, the film is boisterous, likable, anecdotal, and also something Gray almost never is, which is fun. The tone is at times reminiscent of Barry Levinson in his flashback movies, with Gray, in this case, trying to present his growing up experience as genuinely as possible, as if he were tearing pages out of his diary.
Director: James Gray
Writer: James Gray
Stars: Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta
The opening scene, set on the first day of school, is a small wonder of observational staging. The teacher, the confused Mr. Turkeltaub, is trying to establish how harsh discipline is. The reason he feels he needs to do this is that right here in the early 1980s, we can already feel the students' attention drifting. Fifteen years of counterculture, channeled through popular culture, have worn away his respect.
Dreaming of becoming an artist, Paul draws a caricature of Mr. Turkeltaub, which elicits great laughs, and after revealing himself as the creator of the sketch, Paul has to climb up and stand by the blackboard. Also Johnny, a benign troublemaker who is repeating sixth grade, and is the kind of class clown who makes the teachers nervous because he knows how to play with the students' peanut gallery. These two are friends; for the next few months, they become the class's token delinquents. But Paul doesn't have to put up with what Johnny does when Johnny walks to the front of the class, namely Mr. Turkeltaub muttering "animal" to him. It is a racist insult and a reference to the fact that the school is in the process of integration.
What we once called "race relations" is at the center of the "Time of Armageddon." Believing he comes from a "super-rich" family, Paul is a boy drifting through life, surviving on his wits, his talents, and his propensity to dream, and not really caring about a thing. Johnny, on the other hand, is a poor kid who lives with his grandmother, and his status as the only black kid in the class makes him an outsider. He and the teacher engage in an ongoing psychological warfare, but Johnny, unlike Paul, doesn't have the support system that will take the mistakes out of him.
Gray stages the scenes set in Paul's house in a boisterous way, where everyone is talking at the same time, but he also directs us to see the value systems at work; in this case, the crusades and the prejudices of the suburbs. New York Jewish liberals of the late 20th century. Paul's grandparents escaped Europe before the Holocaust, but they live with it every day, as do his parents: his mother, Esther, a high-strung PTA president who plans to run for school board, and his father, Irving, a mole. as a home repairman who seems like a decent and even cheesy guy until his famous "temper" breaks out.
The actors inhabit these roles: Hathaway makes Esther both loving and blind, and Strong is meticulous in the way he plays the father as a charmless nood with those pockets of anger, but if you look hard enough you can see their love. there too. Anthony Hopkins, as Paul's grandfather, gives the film a note of crisp benevolence, though I couldn't watch his performance without thinking: Why would an actor as good as Hopkins play this aging man with the same Welsh purr you'd expect? listen? of him on a talk show?
Paul, in his own way, is an entitled boy, too entitled, insofar as he feels that he can pick up the phone and order Chinese dumplings because he doesn't like what's served for dinner that night. But the law, as we see, runs in this family.
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