Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022)

[Cremildo]

James Gray's next is ‘Armageddon Time’. "Fred Trump, the Queens-based real estate developer who sired Donald Trump, and the current president will appear as characters."

[domino harvey]

Why

[mfunk9786]

Sounds like it's semi-autobiographical and they're just ancillary characters if that

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

James Gray's next is ‘Armageddon Time’. "Fred Trump, the Queens-based real estate developer who sired Donald Trump, and the current president will appear as characters."

Cate Blanchett is eyeing this one, among several others

[Never Cursed]

James Gray's next is a late '70s-early '80s period family/prep school drama called Armageddon Time, will star Robert De Niro, Cate Blanchett, Oscar Isaac, Donald Sutherland, and Anne Hathaway. Gray wants to shoot in the NYC area as soon as quarantine loosens up enough to allow production.

[Never Cursed]

James Gray's next is a late '70s-early '80s period family/prep school drama called Armageddon Time, will star Robert De Niro, Cate Blanchett, Oscar Isaac, Donald Sutherland, and Anne Hathaway. Gray wants to shoot in the NYC area as soon as quarantine loosens up enough to allow production.

A deal with Focus Features is almost finalized, will shoot at the start of 2021

[diamonds]

James Gray's Armageddon Time

[ianthemovie]

James Gray's Armageddon Time

I'm already steeling myself for the inevitable onslaught of debates and think pieces that we're likely to get this awards season considering this side by side with The Fabelmans.

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve made clear my love for directors who take big daring swings and lean into their stylistic flourishes, but it’s also rewarding to see a filmmaker sublimate those impulses and focus their efforts into effective, earnest, heartfelt storytelling. James Gray’s Armageddon Time, a depiction of a pivotal period of his childhood in the autumn of 1980, is unapologetically generous to its actors, characters, and the audience in a way I really appreciated, even if it isn’t necessarily pushing the form or its thematic concerns anywhere particularly groundbreaking.

As much as the film is deeply personal and biographical, it perhaps functions best as an exploration of the idea of social mobility, the moral and practical sacrifices required to achieve it, and what it represents for this family and those at the top and bottom of the ladder they’re trying to climb.

The film is built around a pair of very good child performances, and if Michael Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb weren’t as successful as they are the whole production would be a failure. I feel like every review has to mention how good Anthony Hopkins is in a small supporting part, so I’ll quickly acknowledge that while spending more time on how good Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway are in higher degree-of-difficulty roles as Gray’s parents.

I loved this as well, for many of the same reasons as you. Gray isn’t a subtle filmmaker, but this is a raw, honest, deliberate and deeply intimate work, that functions as much as a confession reflecting his own ongoing imperfections and frustrations at failing to achieve personal catharsis in sociopolitical action as it does as a mezzo-evisceration of the myth of the American Dream. It’s a dark, pessimistic autobiography, from the content down to the aesthetics, with dark interior shots inspired by Gordon Willis’ 70s work.

I particularly loved how the film functions as memories often do- externalizations of emotions, manipulated by time but pronounced and realigned to form a narrative. I’m waiting to roll my eyes at criticisms oft-charged at Gray for his overstatedness but it makes complete sense that, while these events all doubtfully played out one after the other (i.e. observing your parents talking about how you’re not gonna cut it as an artist following apparently getting a This Just In teacher report about poor grades in the evening following a critical loss..) that’s absolutely how we tend to remember them, because they’re interlocked as such for us, the subject; connected in time around our emotionally-bred schematic comprehension. I found myself getting emotional often during this film, but there was never any corralling tearjerker moment setting this off. Rather, the film is taking the only earnest route it can: leaning into the sadness and impotence to correct that sadness when you’re a deeply empathetic person.

One aspect of the film I did think was novel was its drawing of a peculiar family system. The parenting styles oscillated between passive, authoritative, and authoritarian, without a clearly defined internal logic. I loved that, Gray giving us a slice of what it was like to grow up in a family that was unique, both predictable and unpredictable and how that instability affected his own behavior and worldview. I also loved the less explicit relationship between him and his mother- there’s this isolation he feels as a sensitive person in contrast with his father and brother (who each have sensitivities they struggle to engage with) and the way in which Gray’s younger self takes on his mother’s mental health and emotional burdens is very familiar to me and expertly perceived: painfully lucid to the ineffectual nature of that experience.

As a film about racism and bootstraps-logic signaling the irreversible trajectory of western civilization, it’s terrific, but I do think the film is saying a whole lot more- about alienating family dynamics and even the loneliness of having learning disabilities and attention issues unsupported by systems. It’s really a film about the disease of neglect, pervasive and consuming, more than about one of those symptoms specifically. And because Gray is a mature filmmaker, there are no villains here: it’s just what ‘is’ -as his father exhaustedly discloses in a gasp of childlike surrender towards the end- but he’s leaning into that powerlessly suppressed emotional volcano of inertia- which, sometimes, is all we can do

[therewillbeblus]

Reflecting on Armageddon Time some more, especially at this time of year for me, I think the film is documenting something more universal: the amalgamation of specific moments that forcibly thrust us from the Eden-like naïveté of youthful play and into the stark sobriety of adulthood. It's interesting that Gray's events take place in sixth grade, because that tends to be around the time this awareness sets in for kids. I remember going out trick-or-treating for Halloween in sixth or seventh grade, and coming home with this 'feeling' of loss -a numbness to the chamber of simple joy I had felt all prior years- and it broke me down. That, coupled with being forced into public advocacy post-Spotlight case alongside traumatized adult survivors of sexual abuse- witnessing their own irreversible pain; an experience observing a police officer admitting in a relaxed group of white people to disproportionately targeting black people while on the job, awakening my younger self to the presence of racist behavior in New England; recognition of problematic family dynamics in my own immediate system; experiencing more violent and vulnerable losses better kept to myself, etc., disrupted me from my shell of ignorance and initiated a tangible cognizance to an unjust world. The demolition of that egocentricity hurt, because I knew the knowledge and experiential skill-building I had accrued was not mutable, and could not be undone, and the child in me desperately wanted to 'go back'. These memories bleed together, just like these moments blend together for Gray in his selective autobiography, but they collectively paint a picture of that gravitational force that propels us away from safety in spirited frivolity of introverted innocence. Whenever I bring up my own experiences from this time period with others -regardless of their seemingly trivial nature- they can always relate with their own seemingly trivial examples. This validates the developmental period as not 'unique' at all, but gently traumatic for each individual, less for the severity of the experiences themselves and more for what they represent in existential terms. "Armageddon time" then takes on an entirely new secondary meaning: It's for the world at large, but also for that time of life when organic psychological development coupled with social intrusions yield a pronounced consciousness to the irreversible loss of a security we've cherished most.

[tenia]

Additions on Armageddon Time from Gray himself :
- note how Hopkins' character seems sweet but actually is giving contradictory advices : be sweet - be a Mensch, be yourself - you need to go to this private school. The same happens more evidently about his father, being sometimes unfairly tough but also being aware that the world in itself is unfair.
- everything depicted in the movie happened to him or his brother (and he then rewrote it to make it happen to him), but over a longer periode of time than in the movie (a year and a half IRL, 2 months and a half in the movie).
- the movie wasn't made particularly to depict the US as being racist but being classist. Gray also stated that in some ways, the movie depicts what the US were, what they could have been but also what it started to become. For him, 1980 isn't studied/depicted enough as a turning point in the US, the moment where it went full throttle into capitalistic greed.
- part of this means the movie has no lesson to learn to offer. It's only a depiction, it doesn't show the kid as growing up really, as having learnt much, because Gray didn't feel this way then, but also doesn't believe our society have learnt much either.

SpoilerShow

- his mother died 2 years after the events depicted in the movie from a brain tumor. That's why Hathaway in the movie often complaints about headaches or masses her temples regularly.

[knives]

I’ve made clear my love for directors who take big daring swings and lean into their stylistic flourishes, but it’s also rewarding to see a filmmaker sublimate those impulses and focus their efforts into effective, earnest, heartfelt storytelling. James Gray’s Armageddon Time, a depiction of a pivotal period of his childhood in the autumn of 1980, is unapologetically generous to its actors, characters, and the audience in a way I really appreciated, even if it isn’t necessarily pushing the form or its thematic concerns anywhere particularly groundbreaking.

As much as the film is deeply personal and biographical, it perhaps functions best as an exploration of the idea of social mobility, the moral and practical sacrifices required to achieve it, and what it represents for this family and those at the top and bottom of the ladder they’re trying to climb.

The film is built around a pair of very good child performances, and if Michael Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb weren’t as successful as they are the whole production would be a failure. I feel like every review has to mention how good Anthony Hopkins is in a small supporting part, so I’ll quickly acknowledge that while spending more time on how good Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway are in higher degree-of-difficulty roles as Gray’s parents.

Too bad we don’t have a thread for this yet as I doubt we’ll have a better film this year. After two great excursions away from the dour tales of New York Gray’s return to the city, well Queens, is what I’ve always wanted to see from him and one of the most powerful films I’ve seen. Strong’s Ray Romano impression alone is such a perfect performance of a man of limited social skills striving to succeed for his family.

SpoilerShow

On a basic level this is just a reworking of The 400 Blows hitting every single story beat in a slightly different order and in a radically different context. Yet the film stands on its own with a different set of themes and reason for being from Truffaut to the point that I really only appreciated the degree of debt in the last ten minutes.

I will say that the film’s qualities are compounded for me by how reflective they are of my family’s story. My wife even said as we left the theater that it looked like one of our photo albums. Certain details are different. My mom grew up in Jamaica Estates rather than Forest Hills with the accompanying wealth increase as implied by that and she transitioned from private school to public, but so many events and stories could be mixed here that it felt like reliving those stories I’ve heard a million times.

[Red Screamer]

I’d been half dreading this since the synopsis came out but I thought it was great. It’s a remarkably blunt and direct film, much more prosaic than Gray’s other works, but he somehow holds these qualities in balance with the tenderness of his direction. The origin of the project seems to have been Gray musing on the fact that the Trump family was a major funder of his middle school and asking himself how he fits into that troubling thread of American history. Well, this is how. He conducts a sociopolitical analysis of his childhood without stooping to make the characters mouthpieces or symbols, allowing them some of the self-awareness and irreducible messiness of real humans without losing the film's laser-like ideological focus.

Child performances are praised too often but Banks Repeta’s twitchy spacecase here embodies the vulnerability and confusion of a sixth-grader to the point where sometimes it’s nerve-wracking to watch him totally lose himself in confusion or in weak attempts at puffing out his chest, which is used really effectively when the film has us watch him lose his nerve and fail at crucial moments over and over again. But the film is uncynical enough to keep putting dramatic weight and tension in the character's choices, keeping the possibility open that different choices could have been made and that they would have mattered, even if they were never going to make a huge dent in the vast injustices at play. I was taken aback by how little the protagonist is romanticized. He doesn’t have the charm and exuberance of a Doinel or the kind of charisma that comes with being a bratty rebel. He’s too scared to ever truly rebel and even when he daydreams about becoming an artist the film underlines that this fantasy is more about the brand-name glamor of fame than it is about the art. This film sometimes feels like the anti-Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, examining a defiantly average setting without a cultural fetish item in sight. These kids listen to The Beatles and Sugarhill Gang, and not even any deep cuts, only the greatest hits. Critics who think that Strong's final lines are intended to be taken at face value as the film's message need not apply.