In Armageddon Time, a Filmmaker Looks at His Life and Doesn’t Like What He Sees

Banks Repeta and Anne Hathaway in Armageddon Time. Photo: Anne Joyce/Focus Features

James Gray’s films have always had a deeply personal kick — even the sci-fi thriller Ad Astra and the period adventure The Lost City of Z — but he has never made one quite as naked as Armageddon Time, his mournful family drama set in 1980 Queens. While the setting and the story this time are almost directly autobiographical, what makes the picture feel so confessional and exposed aren’t its narrative details but its structure and style. Gray has built into the form of the film a quiet exploration of generational failure and has zero interest in letting himself off the hook even now.

Gray’s surrogate is a young boy named Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth-grader who seems incapable of paying attention or sitting still in class and bonds with fellow accused troublemaker Jonathan Davis (Jaylin Webb), with whom he’s usually singled out for punishment. Even though the two boys are often grouped together, we can see how Johnny, who is Black, draws an extra measure of contempt from their teacher. Paul is also a handful at home, where his boiler-repairman father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), and PTA-president mom, Esther (Anne Hathaway), try to keep him in line in their respective ways. The only family member Paul seems to listen to is his frail, kindly grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), who speaks of doing the morally upright thing and has terrifying stories about how their Jewish family fled pogroms in Ukraine.

There isn’t much of a central story in Armageddon Time. Instead, Gray relies upon the accumulation of small interactions and incidents to slowly form a portrait of an unforgiving world. He cuts from Paul and Johnny’s slowly developing friendship to life at Paul’s home, where the conversation encompasses everything from the structure of New York’s bridges to the Holocaust. Although they live in middle-class comfort, the memory and fear of victimhood is still very vivid for Paul’s family, as is the ongoing dream of a better life. Paul’s father and mother are each strivers in their own way, which we sense through their casual observations and asides. Along the way, we may notice that, while they may seem outwardly liberal, the family’s attitudes about those they see as beneath them, especially Black people, are rather reactionary.

Gray’s portrait of his family is damning but human. We see their racism, their classism, their self-absorption, but these people are not grotesques. Even Irving, whose abusive outbursts Gray films with the nausea-inducing suspense of a horror movie, is allowed moments of tenderness and insight. Strong portrays this driven man with a nervous, watchful energy, which not only means that we can never tell what he will do next but also that his moments of self-reflection stand out. Irving is not, fundamentally, a stupid or cruel person but someone trapped in his time and place — clever enough to get ahead but incapable of breaking free.

Ultimately, Armageddon Time becomes a tale about the dissolution of Johnny from Paul’s life. When the two boys are caught smoking pot in the school bathroom, Irving blows a gasket, and Paul is sent off to the private school his older brother is attending — a school that counts the Trump family among its patrons. (Jessica Chastain shows up for one memorable scene as Maryanne Trump, giving a speech in which she talks to the kids about the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world. In other words, even she sees herself as a victim.)

All of these seemingly disparate elements are connected. The film is as much about class as it is about race. Paul’s parents, of course, are oblivious of Johnny, who lives with his ailing grandmother and doesn’t even own a phone. In truth, Paul is oblivious, too. Johnny has dreams of becoming an astronaut and collects NASA patches, which he shares with Paul. But when Paul’s grandfather finally buys him a long-promised model rocket, our protagonist doesn’t think to invite his NASA-crazy best friend to join him in testing it out.

What Gray does here is delicate and risky. He has never been a director to spell things out, preferring to let his works quietly unfold in their own odd, understated ways and for meaning to emerge subtly and organically. In Armageddon Time, we see Paul’s life in exquisite detail but are provided almost no insight into Johnny’s. Late in the picture, we get an extremely brief and heartbreaking flash of the latter at home with his grandmother, a moment whose dreamy brevity actually drives home the point: Paul can’t fully imagine Johnny’s life — and neither can Gray. The filmmaker grasps the limitations of his vision and has baked this awareness of his own inadequacy into the movie. Gray is telling his story and has fully reimagined his and his family’s world. But he sees that the fundamental tragedy of his story is that he failed to understand, or even think to understand, Johnny’s. The movie formally erases the young man, the way he was erased out of Paul’s life. As a result, a pall of shame hangs over the entire film.

This is rare. All too often, memory movies like this are encased in cinematic amber, lovely but remote and cool to the touch. Other times, they’re suffused and overwhelmed with connections to the present by the artist’s constant need to emphasize the lessons of the past. Gray instead charts the narrowest of middle grounds. He situates his film in 1980 and allows its stories to play out with the sensibilities of its era. But by letting the picture embody his failures — by turning Armageddon Time into a self-aware look at his own limitations — the director makes that necessary connection between then and now, between the characters onscreen and us watching. In other words, he denies us the one thing these types of movies almost always provide: reassurance. By refusing to let himself off the hook, he also refuses to let the audience off the hook.