REVIEW: Director James Gray's 'Armageddon Time' will take you back to both the innocence and the danger of 1980s New York.
’s drama is, on the surface, straightforward. Paul goofs around, gets in trouble, gets away with things that he shouldn’t under the specter of parents who seem anxious over their son’s recklessness. They’re trying to wring a promising future from this boy, which means, among other things, tamping down his dreams of being an artist, shipping him off to a “better school,” making him become the kind of kid who lugs around a briefcase and slicks back his hair.
There’s a mix here of the obvious and not, the sentimental and not. No one can miss the irony of Paul and his new classmates sitting down to guest lectures about success from powerful people bearing the name Trump. But the point of even this scene is to alert us to all the ways that the noxiousness of this political logic was, at a certain time, for certain people, incredibly appealing. Aspirational, even.
Anne Hathaway stars as Esther Graff and Anthony Hopkins stars as Grandpa Aaron Rabinowitz in director James Gray’s ARMAGEDDON TIME, a Focus Features release. was set in Brighton Beach;took us to Ellis Island. Gray was born in Flushing. He can be sentimental, which is the risk of classically-styled melodrama. And he is no stranger to the risk of sentiment that leans on nostalgia. Family is one of the more powerful anchors of Gray’s movies.
But the key performance here belongs to Jaylin Webb, in a role that’s been criticized for being too spare — a criticism that isn’t without merit, but which risks conflating screen time with depth and doesn’t do nearly enough to consider how much of a role’s depth belongs to the actor rather than the script. The pure, uncomfortable fact is that, being Black and Jewish, neither Johnny nor Paul is white enough, privileged enough. Both are made to feel it.
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