Be a mensch and take a look at the first… | Little White Lies

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Be a men­sch and take a look at the first Armaged­don Time trail­er, would you?

06 Sep 2022

Words by Charles Bramesco

An elderly man wearing a hat and a younger woman seated on a park bench.
An elderly man wearing a hat and a younger woman seated on a park bench.
Anne Hath­away, Antho­ny Hop­kins, and Jere­my Strong guide one boy’s com­ing-of-age in James Gray’s latest.

The place is Queens, New York, and the time is the ear­ly 1980s. A new­ly elect­ed Ronald Rea­gan spouts rhetoric of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism in the nation’s news media, his mes­sag­ing occa­sion­al­ly bro­ken up on the radio by the Sug­arhill Gang’s sem­i­nal hip-hop hit Rapper’s Delight.” The cul­tur­al out­lay of the city is chang­ing, as upward­ly mobile Jews move into tonier neigh­bor­hoods while redis­trict­ed fam­i­lies of col­or get pushed out of their homes. There’s a charge in the air.

The first trail­er for James Grays superb new film Armaged­don Time arrived online this morn­ing to set the scene for a com­ing-of-age film very much root­ed in its time and place. The film­mak­er looks back to his own child­hood expe­ri­ences, remem­bered with an inti­mate speci­fici­ty that entailed the full recon­struc­tion of his par­ents’ house, for a dra­ma the melds the per­son­al with the polit­i­cal as a child gets caught up in the cur­rents of a shift­ing nation.

Paul Graff (wun­derkind dis­cov­ery Banks Repe­ta) is anx­ious about trans­fer­ring from his pub­lic school to a WASP-ish pri­vate acad­e­my, and the prospect of leav­ing behind his bud­dy John (Jaylin Webb). Pres­sures from his mom (Anne Hath­away) and Dad (Jere­my Strong) don’t help, though the firm, patient under­stand­ing of his Holo­caust refugee grand­fa­ther (Antho­ny Hop­kins) always seems to make the dif­fi­cult ques­tions of prej­u­dice and respon­si­bil­i­ty eas­i­er to answer.

Our own Han­nah Strong found the film well-observed in her first-look review from the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val pre­mière, appre­ci­at­ing the del­i­ca­cy with which Gray han­dles a sub­ject that can eas­i­ly veer into self-pity or self-abso­lu­tion: “…film­mak­ers have been mak­ing art about their own white guilt for decades and the mer­its of this are few, but the mis­takes we make as chil­dren have the pow­er to echo through our lives, and we have to live with them, for bet­ter or worse. Armaged­don Time under­stands the past is a for­eign coun­try, and not one you can live in forever.”

As Paul asks him­self what sort of man he might like to be, he’ll cross paths with none oth­er than Fred and Mary Anne Trump, avatars of a ris­ing tide in con­ser­vatism that fore­tells a grim future for his gen­er­a­tion. As plant­ed as this film may be in its set­ting, much of the con­ver­sa­tion sur­round­ing it will sure­ly reveal its rel­e­vance to our present, the issues it pos­es hav­ing only grown more pro­nounced in the years since.

Armaged­don Time comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 11 Novem­ber, and then the UK on 18 November.

Minimalist film poster depicting the New York City skyline. Features cast names and film title "Armageddon Time" in brown text.

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