Armageddon Time (2022)

Directed by James Gray. Starring Banks Repeta, Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins, Jaylin Webb, Andrew Polk, Ryan Sell, Tovah Feldshuh, Marcia Haufrecht, John Diehl. [R]

Writer/director Gray peers into his own past for this childhood story of privilege, bigotry, indifference and inaction. The protagonist is Paul Graff (young newcomer Repeta, looking like Saorsie Ronan’s kid brother), the youngest member of a Jewish family living in Queens, who acts as a reactionary observer—mostly passive, static with anxiety, and/or barely articulate. His head is in the clouds at school, but he finds a fast friendship with a black student (Webb), who’s held back and picked on by their more-than-a-little-racist teacher (Polk); those bonds of friendship, however, will be tested by trying circumstances and insidious (if sometimes well-meaning) influences, such as peer pressure and a father (Strong) who wants his boy to have a better life than he does. More reflective than nostalgic—memories of lost loved ones aside, it’s the rare period coming-of-ager that’s unlikely to make the viewer yearn to visit that time and place—and rarely succumbing to sentiment, it effectively captures the helplessness of youth and the distractedness of family. Some scenes come off as too stagy and instructive, however, which require a more calculated, even melodramatic, hand to really work (e.g., Paul’s told by his warmhearted grandfather (Hopkins) to be a mensch, but the lesson is stored in silence instead of later expressed through an emotionally cathartic release). No cast standouts, although everyone does satisfactory work, strange as it may initially be to see Hathaway at the point in her career where she’s playing middle-aged moms. Jessica Chastain cameos, but while her appearance serves a point (giving a brief speech about the less-fortunate adopting a whatever-it-takes attitude to get ahead), the fact that she’s playing the sister of Donald Trump is simply too jarring to work; ditto Diehl playing their father, Fred, in a couple of scenes.

68/100