Mark Reviews Movies: ARMAGEDDON TIME

Armageddon Time, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 3, 2022

Here's a small family drama, about a kid growing up in 1980, with bigger ambitions. Those goals primarily revolve around prejudice and class, as the boy, who comes from a working-class but well-off Jewish family, becomes friends with a Black classmate, who is being raised by an ailing grandmother and has been held back a grade on account of assorted factors. Armageddon Time is written and directed by James Gray, who uses his own life story as the jumping-off point for this tale about learning important lessons and how difficult it can be to put those lessons into practice.

If the movie itself is any indication, the filmmaker is still having some trouble with the second part. In other words, this is a well-meaning movie that completely misses its larger point.

That it's observant and somewhat engaging as the coming-of-age story, with a clear attention to detail and a few fine performances (and one great one), helps a bit, but that also is sort of irrelevant by the end. The message here is supposed to matter the most, and it comes across as disingenuous at best.

The story revolves around Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), an 11-year-old boy who attends a public school in Queens. He often has his head in the clouds or his face buried in a page of notebook paper, dreaming of becoming a famously successful artist and drawing sketches. One of those drawings—of a hard-nosed teacher, named Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk) and mocked as "Turkey" behind his back and, since he's so despised, to his face—gets him into trouble, although that's because Paul actually admits to drawing it in order to save the rest of the class from punishment.

Another boy named Johnny (Jaylin Webb) isn't quite as fortunate, and the teacher seems to have it out for the kid in a way that suggests a deeper animosity than Johnny's tendency to be the class clown. Johnny is Black, is being raised by a grandmother who's suffering from signs of dementia, was held back a year, and has dreams of becoming an astronaut. The two boys bond quickly because they both get into trouble and each finds the other's dreams to be cool.

From there, the focus moves exclusively to Paul, his home life, and his assorted struggles, while Johnny is pushed into the backdrop to serve as both a plot device and the means of Paul to learn a couple of things about the world. At home, Paul is a bit of trouble, ordering takeout when he doesn't like the meal his mother Esther (Anne Hathaway) has cooked, as his father Irving (Jeremy Strong), an appliance repairman, becomes increasingly infuriated by his younger son's impudence (The kid's older brother, played by Ryan Sell, gets away with stuff, simply because he's the first, apparently).

Paul's moral compass is his maternal grandfather Aaron, who's played Anthony Hopkins with genuine and affecting warmth, patience, and wisdom. Grandpa tells the story of how his family came to the United States, with his own mother's parents murdered, because they were Jewish, in front of her in Ukraine. There's such honest and thoughtful simplicity to the grandfather's central lesson, as Paul starts noticing how poorly Johnny is perceived and spoken about and treated on account of his race. That Hopkins can sell that idea, even as the movie itself seems to believe that speaking it is enough to make a significant point, is a testament to strength of his performance.

Otherwise, the narrative seems to scramble, even though its pace is relaxed, to come up with some kind of purpose. Paul and Johnny get into more trouble, and after our protagonist is beaten by his father, Paul ends up in a private school for the future elite, while Johnny ends up without a school and on the run from foster care in the backdrop. The faculty and funders of the school, including Trump patriarch Fred (John Diehl) and his politically successful daughter Maryanne (Jessica Chastain), are of the pick-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy, and the preppy kids are quick to throw out a racial slur after seeing Paul talking to Johnny.

The whole point, as Paul deals with the concept of prejudice and Johnny keeps getting into trouble (at Paul's suggestion and with his help), seems to be Gray reckoning with the dilemma of this character—a stand-in for the filmmaker, whose own history more or less lines up with Paul's. He's a decent, thoughtful kid with good intentions and feelings of guilt for not living up to them. That such questions of ethics—how far one should act for others at the expense of one's own success or, as the movie frames it, "survival"—are framed in such a way that Johnny essentially becomes a pawn doesn't sit right, to say the least. It becomes especially discomforting as Paul's decisions and inaction have a direct impact on the other boy's life.

Obviously, Gray is wrestling with this conundrum, as well as these contradictions of belief and action, with Armageddon Time. With the framing of the story, though, it's not convincing, either dramatically or, most certainly, as a piece of message-making.

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