Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / Photo by Focus Features
On its face, Armageddon Time resembles a conventional coming-of-age saga about a young Jewish boy in 1980 Queens, New York, grappling with familial, social and educational anxieties and traumas. Yet writer/director James Gray’s follow-up to 2019’s Ad Astra is, beneath that surface, a prickly revisitation of remembrances past, miring itself in a morass of tragedy, heartache, and the complications born from privilege. Premiering in theaters on October 28 (in the wake of debuts at the Cannes and New York film festivals), it’s a heartfelt and somber semi-autobiographical look backward that nonetheless resonates as a universal story about the necessity—and sometimes painful cost—of survival.
Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is a sixth-grader with his head in the clouds—or, at least, with dreams of being an artist, which does much to undercut his academic development. Further hindering his school performance is a wiseass attitude that he also exhibits at a crowded dinner table populated by his PTA bigwig mother Esther (Anne Hathaway), his handyman father Irving (Jeremy Strong), his annoying older brother Ted (Ryan Sell), and his aunt, uncle and grandparents Mickey (Tovah Feldshuh) and Aaron (Anthony Hopkins). Badmouthing his mom’s cooking and ordering Chinese dumplings mid-meal—much to his parents’ chagrin—Paul has a smart mouth and a disobedient streak a mile wide. Still, he’s intensely devoted to Aaron, whom he views as a loving friend, mentor and confidant, and with whom he shares the type of foundational bond he doesn’t have with either his sweet mom or his tough—and occasionally abusive—dad.
Paul’s other close relationship is with Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a NASA-loving Black classmate who was held back a year and who routinely spars with their teacher Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk). Johnny’s brash behavior is an outgrowth of the not-so-subtle racism that wafts through this neighborhood’s air, evident in Turkeltaub’s disparaging comments as well as Mickey’s opinion that Paul should abandon his public school because of its overcrowded classrooms and its Black students. Johnny lives with his grandmother and has little money, and when a class trip to the Guggenheim Museum is announced, Paul offers to front Johnny the cash needed to go, claiming that his family is rich. This isn’t true—the Graffs appear to be lower middle-class—but such socioeconomic tensions are ever-present in Paul’s day-to-day, especially since his sibling Ted attends a private school that’s paid for by his grandparents.