arts & culture
‘Armageddon Time’ an Honest,
Overworked Tale of Two Americas
T he potency of James Gray’s
“Armageddon Time” relies on the
fi lm being watched in 2022.

A New York boy coming of age in 1980,
protagonist Paul Graff (Banks Repeta)
turns to a friend and tells him that his
favorite band is Th e Beatles.

“I hear they’re getting back together
soon,” he says with confi dent earnestness.

Th e sad joke is that, of course, the
band — unbeknownst to Paul — was
not getting back together. John Lennon
would be fatally shot on Dec. 8 of that
year, just a couple of months aft er Paul
starts his sixth-grade year at a Queens
public school.

On day one of the new school year,
Paul rekindles his friendship with Johnny
(Jaylin Webb), a Black boy held back a
year, and the two fi nd glee in making
mischief. Johnny almost always receives
22 the harsher punishment of the two, but
their friendship endures, despite Paul’s
family’s sour outlook on the presence of
a Black kid in Paul’s life.

Eventually, the Graff s transfer Paul
to the same private school as his older
brother, where Paul trades in well-worn
striped turtlenecks for a trim suit and
his Black classmate for pale, wealthy ones
who spit the n-word.

As Paul still struggles at his new school,
head in the clouds and hands busy doo-
dling, Johnny struggles, too. Tired of
the punitive nature of his public school,
Johnny drops out and asks increasingly
larger favors of Paul: He needs a place to
stay away from his senile grandmother
and money to run away to Florida, where
he can become a NASA astronaut.

In the middle of everything is Paul.

His father Irving (Jeremy Strong) is a
hot-and-cold repairman who has no
problem whipping Paul with his belt
NOVEMBER 17, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins in “Armageddon Time”
upon learning from his wife Esther
(Anne Hathaway) that Paul had smoked
pot in school. And Paul can no longer
rely on the goodwill of Esther, who is the
president of the district’s parent-teacher
association. Education is the most important
thing to the Graff family, a tight-knit
Ashkenazi family.

Paul’s grandfather Aaron Rabinowitz,
played as gentle yet haunted by Anthony
Hopkins, encountered enough strife fl ee-
ing Ukraine in decades past. He wants
Paul to keep his head down and remember
the sacrifi ces his family made to immigrate
and assimilate to the United States to give
the young generation a fi ghting chance of
going to college. A private school funded
by the Trump family (yes, that Trump
family) is the family’s best bet.

Between Hopkins’ tra-la-la dialogue
with Paul and the palpable weight of
family trauma bearing on him, the patri-
arch builds the foundation of a family
just trying to make it, fi nding levity
in the ever-serious days building up to
Ronald Reagan’s election.

Among the next generation, Hathaway
and Strong’s depictions of Paul’s parents
show a tenacity to achieve this American
dream, even willing to step on the heads
of others. Paul, despite being warped
by his family’s and classmates’ racism,
still wants to be friends with Johnny. He
knows how to stand up for what’s right,
but with no backup and increasing famil-
ial pressures to stay out of trouble, it only
becomes harder for Paul to do so.

In a seamless dialogue between
childhood naivete and optimism and
grown-up jaded realism, “Armageddon
Time” has no problem raising the stakes
and letting the audience squirm and
sit with a struggling Jewish family’s
anti-Blackness and proclivity toward stiff
punishments. Gray doesn’t pull punches
in showing Johnny’s descent into trouble.

Johnny’s is a fate that has become all too
familiar to a liberal white audience, who,
since the 2020 Black Lives Matter pro-
tests, has perhaps spent the better part of
two years learning about the school-to-
prison pipeline and police brutality.

Gray relies on today’s zeitgeist to a fault.

When Fred Trump, father to the U.S.’s
45th president, introduces Maryanne
Trump to speak at Paul’s school, the
scene defl ates the bubble of period-era
verisimilitude Gray had so slowly and
steadily built. Clues of the private school’s
elite and conservative status abound, even
without the notorious family's presence.

A period piece of the 1980s,
“Armageddon Time” says more about the
politics of the 2020s, but perhaps not in
the clever, understated way Gray intended.

With its strong cast of actors, atten-
tion to detail and gut-punching plot,
“Armageddon Time” could have
cemented itself as an evergreen mod-
ern classic of interracial friendship and
the turmoil of generational trauma. But
sometimes a little too on the nose, the
fi lm makes itself vulnerable to feeling
dated in a time of a rapidly changing
political and social landscape. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Focus Features via IMDb
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER