In 'Armageddon Time' it's the fall of 1980 and Paul Graff (Micheal Banks Repeta), a 6th grade Jewish boy living with his blue collar family in Queens, learns important lessons about race, class, friendship, his family and himself. All of this you can more or less gather from the movies trailer, it looks to be a pretty conventional coming of age/awaking of social consciousness film and in broad stokes it is that. However there is a certain gruffness here, a hard edge of disappointment and disillusionment that sets it apart.
While not exactly autobiographical, writer/director James Gray (whose been making movies a good while but this is the first of his films I've seen) was a young boy growing up in Queens in 1980. His childhood period piece is remarkably free of nostalgic glow. Paul isn't a particularly bad kid, but he's not a very good one either. I must confess I could see alot of a younger me in him.
Paul seems to have an undiagnosed learning disability (we are here about a decade before the idea of ADD was mainstreamed). He's an underperformer, he's flighty, selfish in a non self aware away, very naive about the basic functionality of the world around him. In his family he is his mother's favorite, but is bonded most deeply with his indulgent and well meaning grandfather played by Anthony Hopkins.
Socially awkward Paul befriends held back black student Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb, also good) at his public school. The two commit various minor trespasses together, eventually partaking of Marijuana while not knowing entirely what it was. Subsequently and with financial help from grandpa, Paul is enrolled at Forest Manor Prep, a real world private school in Queens. It is here that we meet two real world characters, Forest Manor graduate Maryanne Trump and school benefactor Fred Trump.
One of the films more interesting gambles, having two Trumps as characters in your film is risky for a number of reasons. Somewhat surprisingly Fred and Maryanne do not come across as mere charictatures, they feel like real people to me. Maryanne has only one scene, as a visiting assembly speaker at the school she gives a speech, Jessica Chastain seems to be giving best efforts in the small role. Fred Trump (John Diehl) has a few scenes, he first emerges sulkely in the background, a kind of vaugly menacing Dabney Coleman type, he's pleasant enough, remarkably so from what I know of Fred Trump, but there is a subtext to him, self satisfied, subtily racist and willing himself the aura of a great and beneficent man.
Paul grows more dissatisfied, self pitting, he makes a stupid decision that may be the turning point of his life. Yet there is also some naive nobility to the way he handles getting caught. 'Armageddon Time' is not a great film, mostly it's just okay, but it has a few moments and a way of just brushing up against the profound, the way a child would, something I found to be unexpected and satisfying. ***
PS I'm just not sure what to make of Ann Hathway's Jewish mother performance, but I thought that Jeremy Strong was pretty good as the father.
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