Armageddon Time (2022)
Directed by James Gray
In 1980, Queens, New York, a young Jewish boy befriends a rebellious African-American classmate to the disapproval of his privileged family and begins to reckon with growing up in a world of inequality and prejudice.
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42 films that influenced Armageddon Time
What critics say influenced Armageddon Time
The tone is sometimes reminiscent of the one struck by Barry Levinson in his memory films (“Diner,” “Tin Men,” “Avalon”), with Gray, in this case, trying to present his experience of growing up in as genuine a way as possible, as if he were ripping pages from his diary.
When “Armageddon Time” focuses on that story, it’s reminiscent of far better films like Barry Levinson’s “Avalon.”
Critic Owen Gleiberman’s comparison to Barry Levinson’s multigenerational Jewish-American saga Avalon is on target.
It’s a little “Basketball Diaries,” a smidge of “The Graduate” and a heaping helping of Barry Levinson’s far more sentimentalized childhood reverie “Avalon,” which was also built around lots of extended family dinners.
It's like Barry Levinson's Avalon morphing into The 400 Blows.
After becoming entranced by a Kandinsky painting, the two ditch the field trip and escape to Central Park, then an arcade and a record shop to buy a Sugar Hill Gang album—unleashed scenes that recall the energy of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) in their freedom from school and authority.
It's like Barry Levinson's Avalon morphing into The 400 Blows.
What do Ordinary People, Wildlife, Boyhood and The 400 Blows have in common?
James Gray’s Armageddon Time is the kind of movie you get when a talented filmmaker thinks back upon the painful moments of his childhood and then, after close reflection, decides to remake The 400 Blows.
If Gray is going to evoke “A Tale of Two Cities,” he failed to create the kind of friendship Charles Darnay had with Sydney Carton.
Only James Gray would saddle a modest self-portrait about his memories of sixth grade with a title that makes it sound more like “Apocalypse Now” than any other film ever has (a reference to candidate Reagan’s nuclear hawkishness, “Armageddon Time” borrows its name from a 1979 Willie Williams reggae jam famously covered by The Clash).
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It worked when Sidney Poitier jumped off the train to save Tony Curtis’ life in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), and Gray is hoping, with all the best intentions and underwritten characterizations, that it will work now.
Examples range from “ The Defiant Ones ” to “ The Help .”
The tone is sometimes reminiscent of the one struck by Barry Levinson in his memory films (“Diner,” “Tin Men,” “Avalon”), with Gray, in this case, trying to present his experience of growing up in as genuine a way as possible, as if he were ripping pages from his diary.
The tone is sometimes reminiscent of the one struck by Barry Levinson in his memory films (“Diner,” “Tin Men,” “Avalon”), with Gray, in this case, trying to present his experience of growing up in as genuine a way as possible, as if he were ripping pages from his diary.
These whimsical asides feel inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1983) or perhaps even Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (1983), where Paul’s mental images take over the screen.
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I also enjoyed pointing out the nostalgic early 1980s details (Paul's Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox, "Private Benjamin" showing at the cinema, etc.).
Likewise, only James Gray would render that self-portrait into such a powerful story of post-war assimilation that a family outing to see “Private Benjamin” might resonate with the same cosmic scale as a trip to Neptune.
The last movie he set in New York was his 2013 period drama, “The Immigrant,” whose story finds a resonant echo here when Paul’s grandfather reminisces about the family’s own passage through Ellis Island.
This is what Gray (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z, The Immigrant) does with Armageddon Time, a clear-eyed coming-of-age drama that is surprisingly muted compared to the artistic flourishes—particularly in mise en scene and camerawork—of his previous films.
(At first, his critical support came mostly from France.) Starting with Two Lovers , his films abandoned their genre elements — The Immigrant and The Lost City of Z turned to the past.
The Russian-Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach served as a forlorn and culturally complex backdrop to Two Lovers, the romantic drama he made next, while The Immigrant cast its gaze back through time and memory to evoke New York in the early 1920s, mythologizing it in smoke and gold while rendering the emotional lives of characters in thrall to its expanse with a fraught and fiercely intimate melodicism.
As a director, James Gray has lately been a filmmaker of grand gestures, whether with period pieces like the lush “The Immigrant” to 2019’s sci-fi opus “Ad Astra” starring Brad Pitt.
Little Odessa (1994) was set in Brighton Beach; The Yards in the Bronx; The Immigrant took us to Ellis Island.