Armageddon Time (2022)

A Black-Jewish 1980s friendship probes the rift between promise and regret

Armageddon Time (2022)

Johnny (Jaylin Webb) and Paul (Banks Repeta) racing toward a shared dream of friendship in Armageddon Time

This movie could be said to turn on the challenging question Rodney King put to our national consciousness: Can we all get along?  Was King, speaking in 1992, setting a low bar?  Or in the years since has it proved to be a discouragingly high one?

Sadly, I think the latter is profoundly the case.  And all along some of the rancor has been sown within our families, where suspicion of anyone who’s different can be calmly served at the dinner table. Fairness and a sense of shared citizenship may not even be offered as dessert.

These insidious contradictions can rip a person, especially a young person, apart. This movie, set in 1980, shows one strand of the tattered social fabric King’s words sought to mend.

Writer-director James Gray (Ad Astra) has said that this coming-of-age story draws on memories of his own childhood during that year within a Jewish family in Queens, New York City, where for generations Jews have arrived as survivors of horrendous dislocations.

The Graff family hasn’t forgotten that immigrant past and is still both honoring and fleeing it.  Ronald Reagan’s America is getting underway, and conformity will not only look and sound like the smartest way to behave, but it will also be the likeliest route to success.

Irving Graff (Jeremy Strong) works as a plumber and is a prototypical good provider for his wife and two sons.  He has married up into the mildly prosperous middle class. 

His wife Esther (Anne Hathaway) is a PTA president with carefully delimited hopes for her sons, demanding they toe the line to make their way in Gentile culture.  Don’t rock any boats.  When necessary, Irving can pull out a belt to make the point clear to his boys.

The elder son, Ted (Ryan Sell), in his mid-teens, is responding with only muted protest to his parents’ strictures.  But 11-year-old Paul (Banks Repeta) is struggling.  Inattentive and dreamy at school, he can only freely express himself in his near-constant pen and pencil drawing.

He doodles, then slowly shapes more recognizable figures, but he does so fitfully, almost without thinking, as though something else is on his mind.  Is this merely a boyish escape, or a sign of Paul’s possible future?

His efforts at first seem like little more than crude cartooning.  But he gradually develops a feeling for line and color, and when he carefully draws a ready-to-launch spaceship against an azure sky, his art teacher hangs his work on the classroom wall.

With this sort of faint encouragement, he begins to dream of becoming a visual artist, without any clear idea of what that might entail.  (Of course, we now know that Gray became a writer-director, so the kid’s instincts weren’t steering him wrong.)

Paul’s doting maternal grandfather Aaron Rabinowitz (Anthony Hopkins) encourages his grandson’s dreams and bolsters his idealism, without letting on that there’s a price to pay for both.

He eagerly indoctrinates Paul: You can be an artist. Also, you should stick up for the Black kids at school when the white kids put them down. For the moment, Aaron is sparing his grandson the blunter maxims of concession, trade-offs and sad disillusion. We’re meant to sense Paul wondering: Is it that simple, grandpa?

Paul (Banks Repeta) with his loving grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) in Armageddon Time

Paul’s drawings win approval from his lone Black sixth-grade classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb).  Rebelling against their public school’s stifling robotic teachers, Paul and Johnny form an unlikely friendship. Race doesn’t divide them; not fitting in links them.

And when Paul transfers to an all-white private school packed with rigidly upwardly mobile students, the two friends manage to stay connected.  But their bond proves, not surprisingly, untenable.

When they run afoul of the law, their different backgrounds cruelly mark their separate paths forward, their starkly divergent options.

Gray is attempting something difficult and praiseworthy here.  His movie has no heroes, no flawless role models, no comforting resolutions.  Even kindly, sympathetic grandpa Aaron eventually urges Paul to compromise.

Having ideals is one thing.  Upholding them against all odds is impossible.

Paul is darkly uneasy about his future at the movie’s end.  But now at least it’s a chastened, rightly mortified Paul who’s trembling.

That modest climax feels lifelike, largely because it’s scarily open-ended.  And not just for Paul.  I also admired the way Black-Jewish camaraderie, with its distinct, even catastrophic limits, is honestly portrayed in its frailty, even when it’s begun with good intentions.

In 1980, it was most unlikely that Paul and Johnny could attain co-equal futures.  But it’s possible that their regard for one another isn’t completely snuffed out.  Or so Gray’s screenplay tentatively, achingly insinuates.

The blunt truth is that Johnny’s trajectory never was on the same plane as Paul’s. The two never had the same hurdles to jump. “Let it go,” Johnny is farsighted enough to advise Paul about their bond.

Webb’s nicely controlled, increasingly apprehensive, heartbreaking performance finally severs the two friends as cleanly as the fall of an axe.

The rest of the cast, in a bravura ensemble, ably projects family angst amidst all the raucous mealtime bickering. As a reliably traditional matriarch, Tovah Feldshuh is in fine fettle as Grandma Mickey Rabinowitz.  Though Feldshuh is the only member of the main cast who’s actually Jewish, I found everyone else believable, too.

Most impressive is Repeta as Paul.  He blends the fuzzy aspirations of guileless youth with the slowly deepening understanding that right and wrong are beginning to slip and slide, and refuse to hold still.

Esther (Anne Hathaway) and Irving (Jeremy Strong) are worried parents in Armageddon Time

Hathaway and Strong make believably severe parents who don’t soft-pedal the cruelty that the parenting of the period could inflict. But they’re both also moving as two people nervously, adamantly pushing their offspring into a materially secure — but not necessarily nurturing — future.

Hopkins’ English accent is explained when Aaron recounts his mother’s escape from Ukraine to Liverpool, and this meticulous actor doesn’t overdo the bittersweet avuncular wisdom. He ably suggests an older man’s sorrow, amassed over decades, that’s never entirely been overcome.

That sense of an irreparable past is what Armageddon Time refuses to let go of and ruefully leaves us with.  To its credit, the movie isn’t an act of nostalgia.  It’s about chilling, even horrifying, past chapters that can’t be done — or warmed — over. 

It reminds us that moral catastrophes can’t be shuffled off by getting ahead, socially or materially.

And ahead of what exactly?  That nagging question overhangs the whole struggle for acceptance we see playing out here.  Armageddon time is never entirely over.  It slouches along, a savage soulmate, into everyone’s future.