Hopkins anchors melancholic but hopeful coming of age picture
With Armageddon Time, writer/director James Gray (Ad Astra; The Immigrant) has made his Belfast. Gray’s loosely autobiographical film substitutes the dawn of the Reagan era in early 1980’s Queens for the Troubles of 1960’s North Ireland. Like Kenneth Branagh’s protagonist Buddy (Jude Hill), though, Gray’s stand-in Paul (Banks Repeta) similarly faces the confusion and challenges of growing up in a volatile and uncertain time. The result is a film that, while occasionally heavy handed, nevertheless boasts some strong performances and leaves us with a message of hope.
It’s the fall of 1980, and Paul starts 6th grade as the Reagan-Carter election looms. The film takes its title from a quote from Reagan: “We might be the generation that sees Armageddon,” he says on TV, as Paul’s parents Irving (Jeremy Strong) and Esther (Anne Hathaway) watch with concern. Indeed, the film isn’t subtle about drawing a direct line from the rise of the decadent, “Greed is good” Reagan years to the divisive and fraught Trump era that’s still with us today. To underscore the point, Donald Trump’s father Fred (John Diehl) and his daughter Maryanne (Jessica Chastain, in a scenery-chewing brief cameo) even make appearances, and to say their characterizations border on villainous puts it mildly. The Trump characters symbolize the elite, moneyed white power structure, both at Paul’s prestigious private school and in the wider world that surrounds Paul, his Jewish family, and his Black friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb).
Paul and Johnny’s friendship is the core of the film, and the contrast of how they live and are treated by those in power provides the picture’s overarching theme. The film’s exploration of systematic racism, white privilege, classism, and anti-semitism sometimes feels a little too preachy, but, ultimately, ends up powerful and effective. That’s due in large part to emotionally resonant performances from Strong, Hathaway, Webb, and Anthony Hopkins as Paul’s wise and beloved grandfather, Aaron.
As Paul, Repeta, who looks distractingly like Saorise Ronan’s kid brother, is in virtually every scene, which is too bad, since he’s the weakest of the bunch. Whether the fault of Gray’s script or direction is unclear, but Repeta plays every scene either as a bratty, annoying hard case or as a befuddled, slightly dim pre-teen. Neither is particularly likable. Webb fares much better in the more difficult role, and that he disappears after a key moment in the story is disheartening. The film’s VIP is easily Hopkins, though, whose Grandpa Aaron dispels the kind of warm but knowing life lessons that stem from a lifetime of experiencing disappointments and tragedies.
The film wants us to see that Paul has a sort of moral awakening at the picture’s end, but it comes at the cost of highlighting Paul’s story over Johnny’s. As Irving tells Paul in one of Strong’s best scenes, life is unfair, and sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t yield our desired results. “It’s hard to fight, isn’t it?” Grandpa Aaron consoles a despairing Paul after he’s met with an incomprehensible outcome to an action he thought would play out differently. But Aaron encourages Paul to never give in, and to always keep trying. That’s all any of us can do, Gray’s film tells us, even when the world feels hopeless and unfair. And that message alone makes Gray’s picture worth a look.
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Armageddon Time opens today at Bay Area theaters.
