Make something personal. That’s the advice given to EVERY moviemaker on the planet. Well, James Gray, I hope you go back to space, or the jungle. The talented Gray gets basically autobiographical with Armageddon Time, about his life as an 11 year old growing up in Queens. I’m certain this movie is true to the director, but there’s a reason stories like his have fallen out of favor in 2022.
1980 New York City is a time of flux for young James Gray aka Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta). An artist at heart, Paul struggles to find connections. His mom Esther (Anne Hathaway) and dad Irving (Jeremy Strong) are too wrapped up in day to day life struggles to pay him any attention. School is worse, run by authority obsessed rule followers. The only solace Paul has is talking to his grandpa Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), and his one friend at school, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a black kid a year older than Paul who’s more ostracized and cast aside than Paul is, in no small part because of Johnny’s skin color.
Armageddon Time is at its best when Gray is crafting life in a working class Jewish family in 1980s New York City. There’s no ounce of glorifying his family here. Gray’s family is filled with flawed, complicated people who want to do right but have no power to do so. Strong and Hathaway are excellent, crafting real people operating under constant stress and unable to connect with their son. Strong also gets the big Oscar moment, with an incredibly acted monologue near the end. On the other end of Gray’s family is Anthony Hopkins, who is more warm and understanding of Paul, making the teen more receptive to his lessons, even though they’re contradictory. But Gray’s greatest trick is transporting us back in time to life in 1980. For a working class kid, there are moments of joy, like a day trip to the Guggenheim or a pinball arcade. But surrounding those brief happy times are all these adults lording their power over you, leaving every day fraught with struggle and no one to help you navigate through it. And when nowhere is safe and no one is teaching you, that’s a perfect recipe to become scared and desperate, as Yoda might say, the path to the dark side, bleak stuff Gray fearlessly puts himself aka Paul through in Armageddon Time.
But at the core of what could have been a great family drama is a story problem Gray can’t escape. No matter how autobiographical the movie may be, watching Johnny, the lone black character, be relegated to a pawn in Paul’s life should make the audience feel pretty icky. The story itself knows this at least a little, because of how poorly it portrays every member of the Graff family. But, Gray chooses to center his tale around his 11 year old self, who gets generally a more sympathetic portrayal that maybe Gray was hoping. Especially the ending, which made me cringe and get pretty angry with the sentiment it was going for. There’s also quasi cameos that hurt the movie as well, because they unnecessarily add political animosity into a movie that feels like it’s deflecting its moral complications to others to avoid conflict. It would almost be better if Johnny was excised from the story entirely than how he is handled in Armageddon Time, which taps into old storytelling tropes of using black actors to give meaning to white stories.
Like Paul refusing to eat his salmon dinner, I refuse to eat large chunks of what Armageddon Time is serving me. I’m glad James Gray got his personal story off of his chest. Because now, hopefully he can go somewhere else and tell interesting stories with a more objective eye. Although I do agree with him, pinball arcades rock, as well as the Sugar Hill Gang.