Through the past darkly: “Armageddon Time” (2022)
Indeed, Paul’s journey into middle school mirrors much of what a number of us felt who were older. The sense of being unmoored in a rapidly changing for the uglier world permeates the kid’s life as well as that of his family’s. Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway fill out two of the most complex parental figures on screen; both are torn between obvious love for their youngest, as well as the hopes they’ve projected on him and the frustrations that come from those every time Paul screws up.
Rounding out the ensemble is Paul’s grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins, turning in a well-rounded performance, effortlessly, even if slightly beleaguered by a non-specific accent that runs through a kind of Eastern European-British-Brooklyn gauntlet.) Aaron has helped keep Paul’s parents afloat through hard times but seems to have done so with grace and an absence of lording it over them. He is Paul’s wingman, his confessor, and coach in his corner. In other hands, it could be a treacly turn or a reduction to the “magical grandpa” figure that inhabits other such films. We are not in such films, though.
Gray accomplishes something like a miracle here: his depiction of that first transition from childhood to the last year before adolescence is full of the anxiety that confronts a kid who’s head is in the clouds when it isn’t up his ass. Paul is not engaged in his schoolwork (who can blame him: his teacher is your typical can’t-wait-for-retirement martinet (Mr. Turkentaub, played with precision unctuousness by Andrew Polk) who believes in discipline of the most idiotic kind (when Johnny and/or Paul act up, it’s isolation in front of the class or cleaning the chalkboard or, of course, a trip to the principal’s office).
Johnny and Turkentaub have a history, with Johnny repeating the sixth grade. It is obvious that Johnny has discipline issues that stem from domestic and socioeconomic disadvantage of a high order. Like Paul, he’s whip smart; unlike Paul, he doesn’t have the privilege of being white or even lower middle-class. Paul bonds immediately with Johnny owing to shared interests (the space program) and music (Paul is more of a Beatles kid and Johnny introduces Paul to Kurtis Blow and The Sugar Hill Gang). Also, it isn’t a stretch to say that Paul admires Johnny’s give zero fucks attitude toward authority.
This is just what’s happening at school in Paul’s life. At home, his dad Irving and mom Esther are doing what they can to provide for their sons. Their older boy Ted, attends a private school that they surely couldn’t afford were it not for Aaron’s assistance; Esther has eyes on running for the school board and so argues for Paul remaining in public school, and possibly, so as not to add to another fiscal burden for her father.
Both parents put their hopes onto Paul, even more than Ted who comes across as less of a defined personality, not because he is an uninteresting or insufficiently realized, character (Ryan Sell does an admirable job of rising to the occasion), but because we are very much experiencing this film through Paul’s eyes and it is by turns arduous, intermittently carefree, and downright nightmarishly fraught with life’s realities impinging at almost every turn.
Now, just to be clear, as much as I started out underscoring that it was hard to warm up to the characters in this film, you do. Eventually, it grows clear that Paul’s problems are reflections of the shared challenges facing his family and even, by extension, the country. The Graffs make no bones about Ronald Reagan (“what a shmuck”) and at the same time, despite their liberal leanings, don’t seem to regard Black people, with the same regard. Gray captures deftly the integral sense of family that binds the family. He is also able to provide larger contexts for Paul about the world he is growing into.
When Aaron tells Paul about leaving his (Aaron’s) mother having to leave Ukraine and Paul asks why, Aaron replies “because they wanted to kill her” and expands on the pogroms of the Jews at the hands of the Bolsheviks following the Russian Revolution. As with every beat in this film, there is not a hint of the maudlin or crass sentimentality that could have derailed the casual matter-of-factness with which Aaron tells Paul of the antecedents that led to the family being there. He tells Paul about how even upon coming to America, the general antisemitism they encountered lead to the change in name from Rabinowitz to Graff. How much of this does Paul get? The beauty of it is that you can’t really tell. He’s a smart kid, but he is, after all, only eleven.
In the meantime, Paul continues to get into trouble at school that culminates in getting called into the principal’s office with Johnny for smoking a joint that neither one of them really seemed to regard as a big deal. It is Esther who arrives to deal with the situation and it becomes apparent that her run for the school board is not going be a wise move. Paul, not at all comprehending the consequences of action, mouths off to his mother on the way down the stairs and Hathaway delivers one of the most unnerving performances of her career as Esther turns into a feral mother determined to get her son to see how far things have gone. That she forbids him to see Johnny ever again is not rooted in Johnny being Black she avers (“you know why” she spits at Paul); that he has tanked her political aspirations doesn’t seem to reach him; but being told that she is definitely telling his father about this does get to him.
The utter terror that consumes Repeto’s performance feels frighteningly genuine. If I had not grown up in a period when corporal punishment was not unusual, Irving’s anger at Paul would read as wholesale, sociopathic abuse. But I know Paul’s terror; the consuming fear of a beat down at the hands of a parent was the nuclear choice for parents when I was coming up. It is wrong and as we now know, indefensible and it is this that adds to the sickening sense of injustice and opens up the floodgates of empathy to Paul. It doesn’t last long; but it feels like it goes on forever.
Paul is now on track to attending Ted’s private school. Frying pan to fire. The uniform, the cleaner, more well-appointed halls, the whiteness of it all, is demoralization. As Paul confides to a counselor, he doesn’t know if he fits in and when Johnny shows up to ask Paul if he’s going to The Sugar Hill Gang concert that night, it becomes obvious how little Paul does fit in. Paul denies knowing Johnny that well and after a kid drops the N-word and asks Paul if he ever came to his house, Paul’s discomfort is so thick you could touch it from the screen.
As it happens, Johnny has bigger problems. He also told Paul that New York’s child protective services are after him and that he’s being taken from his grandmother whom he lives with and has a plan to go to Florida where his brother lives. Johnny takes up lodging at a shed Irving built for Paul in the back yard and it isn’t long before Paul has an epiphany; they can both get out of town by boosting a computer from Paul’s school, fencing it and getting out of Dodge with the proceeds.
Of course, this all goes tits up. The serial number shows up on a list of stolen goods, the cops show up and cuff Johnny and catch Paul as he’s fleeing down an alley. In short order, they’re both in an interrogation room; Johnny cuffed, Paul not. The cop questioning Paul has a good read on the kid and asks him if there is trouble at home, telling Paul that the NYPD can help. There is a moment when it seems Paul is going to sell Johnny out but then confesses that the whole plan was his idea; he cajoled Johnny into doing something he didn’t want to do. It’s a heartrending moment among others that linger with a cumulative effect, including the talk in the car when Irving assures Paul he’s not going to beat him; how Irving really wants his boys to have a better shot at life, and how he understands that Johnny taking the fall isn’t fair, but that life is decidedly unfair. He and Paul agree that his mother is to never hear about this.
There are too many moments in this film that stand out and pretty much capture what passes through the filters in any kid’s head. James Gray has pointed out Reagan’s strategy of using Armageddon as pivotal part of his platform had a terrifying effect on kids at the time (honestly, it had a similar effect on us twenty-somethings, as well.)
The utter whiteness of Paul’s school and John Diehl’s turn as Fred Trump and Jessica Chastain as Maryanne Trump could be used as a diagram for the point of origin of the Republican Party we have around us now. When Maryanne mentions there is an election coming up and all the kids (except Paul) should “Go Reagan!”, my blood ran cold but I also realized why the indoctrination of younger people (now in their late forties and fifties) could be so thorough; get ‘em while they’re young.
There was a churlish review in an outlet to the effect that Johnny was just a lazy trope; i.e., the “Magical Negro” that wakes up a white person to racial inequality. Nope. Paul’s not that enlightened. I don’t think he had a clue what Johnny was going through or the challenges Johnny faced on the daily. If anything, “Armageddon Time” is unsparing in its depiction of white privilege.
There’s also so many small moments that surprise; everyone is concerned about how Paul is going to react when they have to visit Aaron in the hospital. Paul handles it with grace (the only time in the film when he genuinely rises to the occasion) and is more concerned about his mom. It’s a striking moment and again, delivered with understatement.
I mentioned above Aaron’s place in Paul’s life and again, it is to Gray’s credit that he (and Hopkins) gave us moments that only take place between grandparents and grandkids. Hopkins’ Aaron, in nine-tenths of other films, would have been the wise old patriarch who talks in pithy aphorisms; here, he asks Paul questions, he’s genuinely interested in what his grandson thinks and supports the youngster’s dreams. That said, it was Aaron’s idea to send Paul to Ted’s school. Aaron tells his grandson that it is so Paul will have a greater advantage in life.
Regarding that last plot point, there was a moment when I thought that maybe Aaron is just as classist as his wife and sister seemed to be, but that’s dispelled when you hear it repeatedly how marginalized Aaron realized he was throughout his life. Also, his lesson to Paul to “be a mensch” and stand up to white kids who say bad things about Black kids is about as straightforward a lesson as any on screen. Again, delivered with zero shmaltz and landing with the quiet force of a quick shot to the stomach.
We are a far cry from Gray’s more recent films like “Ad Astra” or “The Lost City of Z”. This has much more in common with his first feature “Little Odessa” a reflection on family loyalty and dysfunction (and the Russian mob) not so far from the Graffs’ situation here.
This is also his first film shot digitally and you could have fooled me (indeed, Gray and his cinematographer Darius Khondji did fool me!) Khondji used lenses from the seventies and I wonder how much that had to do with aspect ratio and color saturation. To be sure, his work, going back to Jeunet’s “Delicatessen” has been remarkable. Khondji’s eye for texture and layers of grain and tint have added richness to movies like “Uncut Gems”, Haneke’s “Funny Games”, and Danny Boyle’s “The Beach” (as well as other films for Gray, “The Lost City of Z” and “The Immigrant”).
Altogether, I was surprised at how tough this film was. The previews had me thinking that it would be a warm, family against the world, kind of movie; I was only about 5% right. It is so much, much more. It put me increasingly more in mind of Noel Baumbach’s work, but with far less irony.
That is not to insinuate that “Armageddon Time” is awash in earnestness, just that its honesty is genuine. It might be that it is more of a piece of the tradition of clear-eyed retrospect that characterizes Truffaut’s “400 Blows” and the short list of films like it that are unsparing in the coming to awareness of how shitty the adult world can be.
That said, Paul does have a family that does hold it together, something that many other kids in similar films do not. There’s no phony optimism, but the positive notes are earned. Well earned, indeed.
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