Post by Dracula on Oct 22, 2022 17:24:10 GMT -5
Armageddon Time(10/21/2022)
Warning: Review contains oblique spoilers
One of the best movies of 2018 was the movie Roma, in which Alfonso Cuarón looked back on his childhood in the titular Mexico City neighborhood during the early 70s. The movie didn’t quite end up being the Oscar juggernaut everyone hoped in what turned out to be a pretty disappointing Academy Awards year, but still, big time critical favorite that got pretty far despite some obvious commercial disadvantages. But a funny thing happened in the next couple of years, suddenly every time a director put out a movie with autobiographical elements about their childhood everyone started calling it “their Roma.” The movie Belfast was deemed to be “Kenneth Branagh’s Roma,” The Fablemans is being called “Steven Spielberg’s Roma,” and I suspect that if Lee Isaac Chung had been a big more famous people would have been called Minari his Roma. It’s all a little baffling since, well, it kind of seems to imply that Alfonso Cuarón invented the autobiographical coming of age movie in 2018, which is plainly ridiculous. François Truffaut is probably rolling in his grave every time this gets invoked. These movies are in fact all part of a very long lineage encompassing everything from John Boorman’s Hope and Glory to Spike Lee’s Crooklyn to Fellini’s Armarcord and I have no doubt that if you searched long enough you can find examples of this going back to the earliest days in cinema. Making a movie reflecting on their childhood is almost a right of passage for filmmakers. And it’s a right of passage that director James Gray embarks on with his latest film Armageddon Time, a movie that’s plainly inspired by his own childhood growing up in Queens during the early 80s.
Specifically, the movie is set during the year 1980 and looks at a twelve year old boy named Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) living in a somewhat upwardly mobile Jewish family. His father Irving (Jeremy Strong) is a plumber and his mother Esther (Anne Hathaway) is heavily involved in the PTA, a position which Paul seems to over-estimate the power of. Paul doesn’t really seem to respect his parents much but does have a lot of affection for his grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), who tells him stories about his immigration to the United States back in the day. Paul goes to a public school which seems to have been integrated recently through bussing, which is controversial amongst the adults in the area and leads to some social stratification amongst the students, but Paul doesn’t know about any of that and he befriends an African American kid in class named Johnny (Jaylin Webb). The two bond over, frankly, a shared interest in misbehaving in class but they both live very different lives. Johnny lives with his grandmother, who seems to be senile, and it becomes clear pretty quick that the teachers and school administrators are much less interested in letting Johnny get away with certain things that they seem to tolerate to some degree from Paul. This stratification becomes even starker when Paul is pulled out of that public school and put into a private prep school.
Though this is Gray’s first time examining his childhood it is nonetheless something of a return to his usual milieu. Gray came to prominence making movies like Little Odessa and We Own the Night, which are these gritty crime dramas but ones rooted in and noticeably interested by the various outer boroughs New York settings Gray placed them in. His 2013 film The Immigrant was also a New York story, but one set in the early 20th Century, and with his 2016 and 2019 films The Lost City of Z and Ad Astra he finally removed himself from the big apple and made a pair of movies based in the UK and space respectively. Ad Astra in particular, while in my view a very interesting film, seems to have been something of a financial boondoggle so making this movie appears to be something of an attempt to re-ground himself and get back to basics. It’s a move that seems to have paid off artistically however because this is clearly a world that Gray feels in his bones and after all these years he seems to have developed a lot of perspective about this era.
The film is set in 1980, and Gray certainly has some degree of nostalgia for this time and about his family but it’s a very sober nostalgia which re-asses the past through modern eyes which highlight that era’s casual racism in a way that something like “Mad Men” might look at the various social issues of the 1960s. Here early 80s Queens is not exactly a “hot bed” of racial animus but certainly a stew of it that’s simmering away. For example Paul’s teacher at the public school is, to be blunt, kind of awful. I don’t think he’s meant to be seen as “evil” or something but he plainly has no idea how to deal with a kid like Johnny and has not gotten the memo about building kids’ self-esteem, a trait of future generations that is often mocked but watching how this teacher operates you can kind of see where the desire comes from. Meanwhile Paul’s family, while certainly tolerant of African Americans in broad strokes, will still find themselves talking about public schools in not so subtly racialized terms with one aunt being so bold as to speak the quiet part load about her concerns over integration at one point with only minimal pushback. Paul’s parents aren’t immune from this either and once he finds himself sent to the private school for dubious reasons the kids there don’t even claim to have such ideals, with one of them showing no hesitation whatsoever to use a nasty racial slur in casual conversation. It’s also probably not a coincidence that it’s established that Fred Trump is something of a bigwig at the private school that Paul is sent to, perhaps trying to establish the kind of world that you-know-who came out of.
This isn’t to say that the movie is all race relations all the time. It is, at its heart a movie about young Paul and his moving from the simplicity of childhood into the more complicated world of adolescence and at its core it’s about Paul first starting to build a consciousness about the world that he doesn’t really have the skills or the perspective to really act on. Racial issues are the domain by which he does this, and having the story of a black kid’s struggles act as something of a sub-plot to a white kid’s personal awakening is something that could easily be… fraught. This is very much a movie about a white (and Jewish) perspective of racial relations in America and if people are kind of sick of seeing those stories I can kind of understand. However, racism is ultimately a problem within white people and it’s a problem that white people are ultimately going to be responsible for solving, so the white view of racism is going to be relevant for better or worse for a long time. The film is also wading into dangerous territory when it dips into the waters of essentially being a “I had a black friend once” story, in which a black and white kid become friends by seeing the world with more innocent simplicity than their prejudiced parents. You know, The Fox and the Hound but with humans. I can’t say this movie completely avoids some of the pitfalls of a story like that but it does approach the idea a bit more sober-mindedly than some movies would. It understands that “the power of friendship” is not enough to overcome a world that’s stacked against someone like Johnny and it avoids white-saviordom by making Paul someone who’s in no position to successfully save much of anyone despite his best intentions.
“Best intentions” is kind of the key concept of the movie. The film’s moral center is Paul’s grandfather, played by Anthony Hopkins, who clearly wants to instill the family’s Jewish heritage and immigrant background in Paul and when he learns that Paul didn’t act to defend Johnny at one point he gives him a show stopping speech (some of which is in the film’s kind of spoilery trailer) telling him, in a less modern vernacular, to use his privilege to help the less privileged and to be a “mensch.” As tends to be the case this is easier said than done, especially when you’re a twelve year old. When Paul does finally decide to stand up and live by his grandfather’s ideals he does so with the logic of a twelve year old who doesn’t know the ways of the world and it largely ends up backfiring. This is the harsh reality of the world: the best intentions often aren’t enough. Ideas that aren’t thought through often backfire and make things worse and there are going to be times where, no matter how deep your convictions are, the deck is too stacked and there’s just nothing you can really do beyond pointless self-sacrificing stunts that help no one. But that doesn’t mean having principles like this is a fools game. Even if there wasn’t much Paul could do this time around, he did live to fight another day and the principals instilled in him aren’t going away and one can hope he may one day use them to more productive ends.
James Gray is a filmmaker who is in some ways kind of cursed to make good movies that everybody seems to like but which kind of can’t get past a certain level of success and acclaim. His movies tend to feel a little too “big” to seem like little indies that need to be championed in earnest but too “small” to really be mainstream and in terms of awards and critical accolades they always seem to just get overshadowed by other flashier projects. Armageddon Time does not seem like it will be an exception to that. In particular Gray has the misfortune of releasing his fictionalized memoir of Gen X Jewish family life less than a month before Steven Spielberg releases his own fictionalized memoir of Jewish Baby Boomer family life and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to guess which of these movies is ultimately going to get more attention. Beyond that though it’s just generally hard for a drama like this to get a whole lot of shine these days and the movie doesn’t quite have that novelty factor that will get people lining up for it. That’s a shame though because this is a strong little movie with smart insights about the world of yesterday and today being made by a filmmaker who’s clearly in a very thoughtful place and it trying to add his piece to the conversation. It’s not necessarily a movie I’m going to go to war championing either but I think it’s coming from a good place and is well worth a look.
**** out of Five
Warning: Review contains oblique spoilers
One of the best movies of 2018 was the movie Roma, in which Alfonso Cuarón looked back on his childhood in the titular Mexico City neighborhood during the early 70s. The movie didn’t quite end up being the Oscar juggernaut everyone hoped in what turned out to be a pretty disappointing Academy Awards year, but still, big time critical favorite that got pretty far despite some obvious commercial disadvantages. But a funny thing happened in the next couple of years, suddenly every time a director put out a movie with autobiographical elements about their childhood everyone started calling it “their Roma.” The movie Belfast was deemed to be “Kenneth Branagh’s Roma,” The Fablemans is being called “Steven Spielberg’s Roma,” and I suspect that if Lee Isaac Chung had been a big more famous people would have been called Minari his Roma. It’s all a little baffling since, well, it kind of seems to imply that Alfonso Cuarón invented the autobiographical coming of age movie in 2018, which is plainly ridiculous. François Truffaut is probably rolling in his grave every time this gets invoked. These movies are in fact all part of a very long lineage encompassing everything from John Boorman’s Hope and Glory to Spike Lee’s Crooklyn to Fellini’s Armarcord and I have no doubt that if you searched long enough you can find examples of this going back to the earliest days in cinema. Making a movie reflecting on their childhood is almost a right of passage for filmmakers. And it’s a right of passage that director James Gray embarks on with his latest film Armageddon Time, a movie that’s plainly inspired by his own childhood growing up in Queens during the early 80s.
Specifically, the movie is set during the year 1980 and looks at a twelve year old boy named Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) living in a somewhat upwardly mobile Jewish family. His father Irving (Jeremy Strong) is a plumber and his mother Esther (Anne Hathaway) is heavily involved in the PTA, a position which Paul seems to over-estimate the power of. Paul doesn’t really seem to respect his parents much but does have a lot of affection for his grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), who tells him stories about his immigration to the United States back in the day. Paul goes to a public school which seems to have been integrated recently through bussing, which is controversial amongst the adults in the area and leads to some social stratification amongst the students, but Paul doesn’t know about any of that and he befriends an African American kid in class named Johnny (Jaylin Webb). The two bond over, frankly, a shared interest in misbehaving in class but they both live very different lives. Johnny lives with his grandmother, who seems to be senile, and it becomes clear pretty quick that the teachers and school administrators are much less interested in letting Johnny get away with certain things that they seem to tolerate to some degree from Paul. This stratification becomes even starker when Paul is pulled out of that public school and put into a private prep school.
Though this is Gray’s first time examining his childhood it is nonetheless something of a return to his usual milieu. Gray came to prominence making movies like Little Odessa and We Own the Night, which are these gritty crime dramas but ones rooted in and noticeably interested by the various outer boroughs New York settings Gray placed them in. His 2013 film The Immigrant was also a New York story, but one set in the early 20th Century, and with his 2016 and 2019 films The Lost City of Z and Ad Astra he finally removed himself from the big apple and made a pair of movies based in the UK and space respectively. Ad Astra in particular, while in my view a very interesting film, seems to have been something of a financial boondoggle so making this movie appears to be something of an attempt to re-ground himself and get back to basics. It’s a move that seems to have paid off artistically however because this is clearly a world that Gray feels in his bones and after all these years he seems to have developed a lot of perspective about this era.
The film is set in 1980, and Gray certainly has some degree of nostalgia for this time and about his family but it’s a very sober nostalgia which re-asses the past through modern eyes which highlight that era’s casual racism in a way that something like “Mad Men” might look at the various social issues of the 1960s. Here early 80s Queens is not exactly a “hot bed” of racial animus but certainly a stew of it that’s simmering away. For example Paul’s teacher at the public school is, to be blunt, kind of awful. I don’t think he’s meant to be seen as “evil” or something but he plainly has no idea how to deal with a kid like Johnny and has not gotten the memo about building kids’ self-esteem, a trait of future generations that is often mocked but watching how this teacher operates you can kind of see where the desire comes from. Meanwhile Paul’s family, while certainly tolerant of African Americans in broad strokes, will still find themselves talking about public schools in not so subtly racialized terms with one aunt being so bold as to speak the quiet part load about her concerns over integration at one point with only minimal pushback. Paul’s parents aren’t immune from this either and once he finds himself sent to the private school for dubious reasons the kids there don’t even claim to have such ideals, with one of them showing no hesitation whatsoever to use a nasty racial slur in casual conversation. It’s also probably not a coincidence that it’s established that Fred Trump is something of a bigwig at the private school that Paul is sent to, perhaps trying to establish the kind of world that you-know-who came out of.
This isn’t to say that the movie is all race relations all the time. It is, at its heart a movie about young Paul and his moving from the simplicity of childhood into the more complicated world of adolescence and at its core it’s about Paul first starting to build a consciousness about the world that he doesn’t really have the skills or the perspective to really act on. Racial issues are the domain by which he does this, and having the story of a black kid’s struggles act as something of a sub-plot to a white kid’s personal awakening is something that could easily be… fraught. This is very much a movie about a white (and Jewish) perspective of racial relations in America and if people are kind of sick of seeing those stories I can kind of understand. However, racism is ultimately a problem within white people and it’s a problem that white people are ultimately going to be responsible for solving, so the white view of racism is going to be relevant for better or worse for a long time. The film is also wading into dangerous territory when it dips into the waters of essentially being a “I had a black friend once” story, in which a black and white kid become friends by seeing the world with more innocent simplicity than their prejudiced parents. You know, The Fox and the Hound but with humans. I can’t say this movie completely avoids some of the pitfalls of a story like that but it does approach the idea a bit more sober-mindedly than some movies would. It understands that “the power of friendship” is not enough to overcome a world that’s stacked against someone like Johnny and it avoids white-saviordom by making Paul someone who’s in no position to successfully save much of anyone despite his best intentions.
“Best intentions” is kind of the key concept of the movie. The film’s moral center is Paul’s grandfather, played by Anthony Hopkins, who clearly wants to instill the family’s Jewish heritage and immigrant background in Paul and when he learns that Paul didn’t act to defend Johnny at one point he gives him a show stopping speech (some of which is in the film’s kind of spoilery trailer) telling him, in a less modern vernacular, to use his privilege to help the less privileged and to be a “mensch.” As tends to be the case this is easier said than done, especially when you’re a twelve year old. When Paul does finally decide to stand up and live by his grandfather’s ideals he does so with the logic of a twelve year old who doesn’t know the ways of the world and it largely ends up backfiring. This is the harsh reality of the world: the best intentions often aren’t enough. Ideas that aren’t thought through often backfire and make things worse and there are going to be times where, no matter how deep your convictions are, the deck is too stacked and there’s just nothing you can really do beyond pointless self-sacrificing stunts that help no one. But that doesn’t mean having principles like this is a fools game. Even if there wasn’t much Paul could do this time around, he did live to fight another day and the principals instilled in him aren’t going away and one can hope he may one day use them to more productive ends.
James Gray is a filmmaker who is in some ways kind of cursed to make good movies that everybody seems to like but which kind of can’t get past a certain level of success and acclaim. His movies tend to feel a little too “big” to seem like little indies that need to be championed in earnest but too “small” to really be mainstream and in terms of awards and critical accolades they always seem to just get overshadowed by other flashier projects. Armageddon Time does not seem like it will be an exception to that. In particular Gray has the misfortune of releasing his fictionalized memoir of Gen X Jewish family life less than a month before Steven Spielberg releases his own fictionalized memoir of Jewish Baby Boomer family life and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to guess which of these movies is ultimately going to get more attention. Beyond that though it’s just generally hard for a drama like this to get a whole lot of shine these days and the movie doesn’t quite have that novelty factor that will get people lining up for it. That’s a shame though because this is a strong little movie with smart insights about the world of yesterday and today being made by a filmmaker who’s clearly in a very thoughtful place and it trying to add his piece to the conversation. It’s not necessarily a movie I’m going to go to war championing either but I think it’s coming from a good place and is well worth a look.
**** out of Five
