Armageddon Time

The responsibility of American Jews.

I wasn’t going to touch Armageddon Time, but I read Richard Brody's re-review of the latest James Gray film, and I felt that I had no choice. Many of us are still reeling from his pan of Tár (good dessert name), but his writing on Gray’s most intimate film since Little Odessa, inspired some thinking.

In the early days of this Substack, like a month ago, I wrote about De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. It is a film that poses questions about Jewish responsibility, focusing on the attitudes two different Jewish Italian families adopt on the eve of WWII. Armageddon Time is similarly concerned with Jewish history, but functions as a loose biography of Gray himself. The film opens in 1980, Queens, where we’re introduced to Paul Graff, Gray’s middle school-aged surrogate.

Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong play his parents, secular, middle-class folk preoccupied with providing their children the best future possible. They’re liberal enough, and recoil at the possibility of Reagan winning the presidency. But they're also deeply ruled by tradition, and along with their own parents (most notably the world’s least likely Zaidie, Anthony Hopkins) they are concerned with the world’s perception of their family and with old-world values.

Like my own parents, they are full of these kinds of contradictions. They want their kids to be proud Jews, but they also give their son an Anglicized name and are grateful “Graff" doesn’t sound that Jew-y. They champion the importance of community and equality, but their racial and class prejudices seep through the cracks of a #voteblue facade. What this all comes down to, what Gray is grappling with, is the role a Jew, once and still often the face of oppression, should play in the face of a more immediate and concerning injustice.

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Paul goes to a public middle school, and his best friend is Johnny, a young black kid who lives with a grandmother unable to take proper care of him. He, according to the school, is a Troublemaker, which makes him the focus of his teacher’s wrath. There’s no care or action to understand Johnny or his troubles, and he is dealt with the way many are dealt with at understaffed, underpaid public schools with class sizes that are, as Hathaway’s PTA mom points out in a flaccid attempt at sincere care to affect change, too large. He does something wrong and he is sent to the principal’s office. He sits for 20 minutes, never meets with anyone, and is sent back to the classroom to do it all over again. There’s no care or support for Johnny at all. And even Paul, with his head in the clouds and a rebellious spirit, isn’t given proper nurturing.

Without getting too deep into where the film goes, Paul’s parents realize that his public school education isn’t helping him and have the privilege to send him to a Horace Mann-type school, where he will be expected to shine. The school is a beacon of hope for New York’s elite, and he’s sent on his first day in a baby business man fit, suitcase and all.

In the film’s most talked about moment, Jessica Chastain appears as Maryanne Trump, Donald’s sister, and delivers an impassioned speech to the students about her own ruthless climb to the top. With no handouts, of course. Never any handouts. Some of the kids listen and cheer, surely mirroring their own parents, but Paul is distracted. He may not know what’s going on, but even still he knows this woman isn’t worth listening to.

Although Paul is equally as lost in this new environment, and is — much to his parent’s anxiety — unable to fit in, there a more meaningful shift in his relationship with Johnny. They begin to grow apart as Johnny’s situation gets more desperate. Without getting into spoilers, the two get into some real danger in order to help Johnny, who is now running from CPS, out. What happens is expected, because Gray and the audience knows that any trouble Johnny will get into, Paul won’t. Paul has a wake-up moment. He will always move through the world differently than Johnny.

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I can see why some are bothered by Armageddon Time’s obvious global politics. There’s the white privilege critique to be made, you know, since this the film narrows in on Paul’s journey. However, its intimate politics are the ones that are spot on.

Armageddon Time avoids the trap many ~reflections on my youth~ films make because, as Brody points out, it has a clear focus. It’s not just a collection of memories and observations, but a documentation of an early moral failure in the life of a young Jewish boy. Brody, who notes that he grew up close to where Graff is supposed to live in Queens, connects with his tale.

Religion aside, I connected with the strong emphasis Paul’s family puts on Jewish values and history. Throughout the film Paul is made aware of his grandfather’s familial past, a mother who saw her father shot, an aunt who found silverware that presumably belonged to Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and is hit on the head with a reminder that Jews never have it easy.

I’m sure this is common for a lot of American Jews. It feels like a collective thing, a consciousness of shared history and an emphasis on the power of memory in the formation of identity. We know the ins and outs of our families, have all read Elie Wiesel, and have reckoned with the impacts of generational trauma, etc. etc.

This is all limiting, however, when the empathy we’ve created for others like us are not extended to others. There are people who have it worse, and Gray’s film is a horror movie about a realization had too late. I think about the film’s closing moments, when Paul’s family once again sits in front of the TV, this time to see that (spoiler) Reagan won the election. As they sit in terror, the conversation shifts, and Paul’s grandmother narrows in on her grandchildren’s education. She’s grateful that they have the best education possible, at a private school. The nightmare continues.

Armageddon Time is currently available to see in select theaters.