Armageddon Time: A Review - Portrait of the Artist as a Stupid and Boring Child

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.  A sanctimonious, self-pitying and tedious tale of childhood turmoil in 1980’s New York. Move along, absolutely nothing worthwhile to see here.

There has been a spate of semi-autobiographical films this year where filmmakers navel-gaze and examine not only their childhood and how they ended up behind the camera, but also the “magic of cinema”.

There’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Bardo, Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, to a lesser degree Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, and finally James Gray’s Armageddon Time.

Of these four I’ve only seen Bardo (I’ve yet to publish my review) and now Armageddon Time, but I can report that thus far this genre of film is proving itself to be a calamitous cavalcade of cinematic crap.

Armageddon Time, which was released in October to dismal box office returns, is not only directed but also written by James Gray. While I respect James Gray as a visual artist, his movies have always been more miss than hit for me. I find his films, which include Little Odessa, The Yard, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, The Immigrant, and Lost City of Z, to be beautiful and tantalizing but mostly noble failures that never quite coalesce. The notable exception being 2019’s Ad Astra, which I thought was a truly stunning and insightful piece of work. Unfortunately, Armageddon Time is anything but stunning and insightful. I would in fact, put Armageddon Time at the very bottom of the list when judging Gray’s filmography.  

The autobiographical movie tells the story of Paul Graff (a stand in for Gray) and his tumultuous Autumn of 1980 when he attends sixth grade in a public school in Queens, New York. Paul’s family is working-class Jewish with plumber father Irving (Jeremy Strong), PTA mother Esther (Anne Hathaway), and annoying older brother, Ted, who attends a tawny private school. Paul also has his maternal grandparents, most notably his immigrant grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), with whom he is particularly close.

Paul befriends a black student in his class, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), when they are both punished by their obnoxious teacher Mr. Turkeltaub. Johnny is being raised in poverty by his dementia-addled grandmother, and is doing sixth-grade for the second time. Mr. Turkeltaub has a particular dislike for Johnny and is harsher on him than on Paul.

The story goes from there as Paul and Johnny get into all sorts of trouble at school, and Paul navigates the consequences back home.

Armageddon Time, which is currently available on Video-on-Demand (I paid $5.99), is an interminably slow, sluggish, self-indulgent and self-pitying exercise in virtue signaling that rings hollow, phony and false on nearly every level.

The acting, with the notable exception of the magnificent Anthony Hopkins, is abysmal. Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong give cringe-worthy, Borscht Belt level performances as Paul’s parents.

The child actors, Banks Repeta as Paul and Jaylin Webb as Johnny, are tough to take, and certainly make the hour and fifty-five-minute runtime feel at least twice that long. Repeta’s Paul is completely unlikable and being in his presence for the length of the film is a struggle. To be fair to Repeta and Webb, their characters are so poorly written that asking them to fill them out seems unfair. Webb in particular is given short-shrift, as Johnny is reduced to the sort of one-dimensional, sad-sack, black martyr/messiah stereotype that is both dreadfully dull and diabolically dehumanizing.

Hopkins is the only actor who gives a grounded performance and generates a character that seems like a real person. His Aaron is like a supernova shining brilliantly as it enters its final stage of life. Hopkins ability to elevate material, and to give poorly written characters a deep and compelling inner-life, is remarkable.

One of the biggest problems with Armageddon Time is that its politics, which are decidedly neo-liberal and Manichean, are relentlessly heavy-handed, trite and vacuous, not to mention omnipresent.

For example, there’s a whole secondary story line involving…God help us… the Trump family, with the loathsome Fred Trump (the Donald’s father) front and center, that is so ridiculously ham-fisted that every time it rears its ugly head it feels like the Evel Knievel over Snake Canyon of shark jumps.

The film’s racial politics are equally bromidic, as they’re so paternalistic and condescending as to be offensive. Ultimately the film and its racial politics ends up being little more than a testament to the fact that an artist’s white guilt is an insidious, narcissistic cancer that generates egregiously insipid and vapid art.

The movie is so patronizing and supercilious it’s like a multi-million-dollar colonial style home in a tawny, minority-free neighborhood that has a “Black Lives Matter” sign in its impeccably-landscaped-by-underpaid-Mexican-illegal-immigrants front lawn.

Gray is Jewish, which is why it’s so confusing that he makes viewers feel like a bored parish priest listening to his confession about other people’s impure racial thoughts.

James Gray went to USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, one of the most prestigious and elitist film schools in the world, made his first feature at age 25, and has had a stellar career working with great actors despite rarely having a hit, it seems that he got everything he ever wanted…so the question becomes…why all the masturbatorial bitching?

The reality is that the artist is never as interesting as his art, or as interesting as he thinks he is…which is why Armageddon Time feels more like a misguided tantrum from a spoiled child grown old than a piece of introspective cinematic art from an artist trying to understand himself.

The bottom line is that Armageddon Time is so sanctimonious and self-pitying, not to mention boring, banal and bland, that it will make you yearn for an actual Armageddon to put you out of your misery. Save your time and your money and skip this tedious tale.

©2023