Armageddon Time (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

The first day of sixth grade could be tough on any kid. Queens in 1980 certainly was tough for Paul Graff, a Jewish-American boy who lives with his parents in a comfortable and financially stable home. Due to his age and expectations of boys at the time, he tends to sleep a lot; when he's awake, he looks a bit lost or bewildered, as though a nap would do him more good than his various activities. Played with sensitivity and bravery by young actor Banks Repeta (The Black Phone), Paul means well but certainly can't stop himself from getting into trouble. His parents and brother seem to fight regularly to make Paul wake up and get going, usually to school. When he's there, he's not shy about causing trouble for his teacher or that he's more interested in doodling, cracking jokes and insults, and thinking about rockets. It's time for Paul to wake up.

At school, Paul meets a new friend at school, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), the only Black student in his class. Johnny is bigger than the other kids; we're told multiple times that he is in sixth grade for the second time, and the teacher chooses to be quite cruel to this student he's sure will be trouble. Johnny gets singled out and harshly reprimanded so often that he begins acting just the way the teacher has proscribed. Paul acts accordingly, relating perhaps a little too strongly to Johnny than his teacher or family would prefer. After a particularly troubling visit with the principal, Paul's mother (Anne Hathaway) calls a family meeting and they decide to send Paul to a private school. 

Armageddon Time is reportedly an autobiography of sorts for writer and director James Gray (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z, The Immigrant). But it's also a thoughtful meditation on the "Armageddon" of our individual youths, the time when some of us had to suddenly change our mindsets and mature to survive. Paul is coming to the realization he wants to be an artist, but his parents want him to actually make a living someday. He's realizing that Black and white kids are treated differently, and that other identifiers such as being Jewish have various stigmas, challenges, and benefits beyond who you are and what you do on a personal level and a social level. He's seeing the inconsistencies between the American Dream messages preached at him and the realities of his family and family history. The Trump family is entrenched in his new private school, and Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain) delivers the first day address to students, lionizing the virtues of hard work and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. Meanwhile, Paul's maternal grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) tells him about their family escaping antisemitic persecution in Europe.

Hopkins is the heart of this film. When Paul is sad that his parents don't support his dreams of becoming an artist, his grandfather gifts him a professional painting set. Though his age is starting to show, much to his daughter's concern, the grandfather is smart as a whip and eager to be a supportive and encouraging voice for Paul, even to the point of challenging Paul to stand up to bullies of his friend Johnny. He's seen the horrors of racial discrimination and persecution, and he has no interest in letting his grandson experience the same thing in the land of freedom and opportunity. He exhorts Paul to be a mensch, which is lovely but particularly difficult for the 11-year-old boy who just wants to fit in somewhere.

Gray works hard to make the film relatively void of sentimentality or nostalgia even as he wants to create a time capsule of period details. By including the Trumps and Reagan as major cultural moments, he drains the film of political or social neutrality. It's all shot in somewhat cold, dim lights, and the interiors of the family home are darkest when the television is blaring news about the upcoming election. Paul's concerns about internalizing the messaging he receives from his grandfather, his parents, and the authority figures at school and on TV are quite blurry -- intentionally so -- and yet it all builds to a whole lot of nothing. He doesn't learn much by film's end except the importance of thinking for himself, which he dubiously acts upon in the film's final scene as he leaves the Thanksgiving dance at school as Fred Trump delivers an address to the students.

I wanted to love this movie, but it just didn't do much for me. If this had come out in 2016, it might have felt more relevant. As it is, it feels like the de-sentimentalized version of Roma or Boyhood or any other number of autobiographies from auteurs. Which is fine, but it's just not the kind of movie I usually enjoy watching. It walks a fine line between sensations that plague this unique genre: sometimes it feels like the director is forcing us to go through old photo albums of his past, and sometimes it feels like the director is hammering home Big Ideas that he realize shaped his developmental stages of life and wants to preach those messages from the realm of his own experience. And yes, reflection on ourselves is important, and reconciling our memories of the past with perspective from the present can be a beautiful thing, but not in heavyhanded lectures like this. It's just not entertaining.

The acting is pretty solid across the board, but the screenplay doesn't seem to know how to give its characters much to do, other than Paul. His father (Jeremy Strong) is sort of amorphous, at times abusive and disciplining, at times gentle and emotional and kind, at times goofy to a fault. Paul's brother is so briefly and shallowly considered he's almost absent. Paul's teacher is a caricature of (pardon the pun) old-school cruelty. Hathaway's mother character has some heft in the actor's hands, but it's not because of the screenplay doing her any favors. Worst, Johnny is so thinly written I fear he is actually just a really bad representative of Black kids in a film that, by definition, should be more sensitive and knowing. It seems the movie as a whole is meant to be a kind of apology to kids like him, but it never really gets to that point, and by the halfway point even seems to largely sweep Johnny away from its concerns entirely. The early parts in which he proves more consequential relegate only a few attributes to him rather than any depth of character, which he frankly deserves in a film about learning to see and appreciate the interiority of people's lives.