One of an elite handful of American directors repeatedly invited back to compete at the Cannes film festival, New Yorker James Gray returns to the Croisette this week for the world premiere of his fourth Palm d’Or contender, Armageddon Time. Featuring a heavyweight ensemble cast including Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong of Successionfame, Gray’s eighth feature is his most nakedly autobiographical yet, a poignant coming-of-age story dramatising real events that happened to him and his family back in 1980.
Banks Repeta stars as Paul Graff, Gray’s on-screen alter ego, a plausibly dorky high-schooler growing up in a lower-middle-class Jewish household in New York City’s outer suburbs. Paul has fanciful ambitions of becoming an artist, but his mother Esther (Hathaway) and father Irving (Strong), a plumber with a violent temper, insist he follows the conventional American Dream route of college, steady job and upward social mobility.
Complicating family tensions further is Paul’s budding friendship with fellow classroom misfit Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a poor black student with a troubled back story, which opens the innocent white boy’s eyes to the barely veiled racism of his teachers, fellow students and police. When both kids get into hot water, Paul’s skin colour helps him escape the punishment that Johnny must face alone. Nobody called it “white privilege” back in 1980, but that is how Gray frames these events with decades of hindsight, a guilty acknowledgement that the game was always rigged in his favour.
Gray says he built Armageddon Time around four key words: love, warmth, humour and loss. There are precious few laughs in this sombre memoir, but three out of four is good enough That said, there is a brief comic vignette featuring Donald Trump’s notorious property tycoon father Fred (John Diehl) and sister Maryanne, played by Jessica Chastain in a small but delicious cameo, which underscores the film’s themes of wealth, power and privilege. The real Fred and Maryanne both gave speeches at Gray’s former school.
Gray’s films are always solidly crafted and elegantly shot, but he also has a weakness for ponderous pomposity. Armageddon Time is lighter and leaner than some of his past work, but not without its earnest, clunky moments. While its insights into race, class and social inequality in America feel pretty obvious, high-calibre acting elevates almost every scene. Hathaway and Strong are both on powerhouse form, but it is Hopkins who provides the film’s emotional heartbeat as Paul’s grandfather Irving.
A dapper old gent descended from Jewish-Ukrainian refugees, just like Gray’s real grandparents, Irving serves as Paul’s moral compass, gently ordering the boy to always “be a mensch” towards less fortunate folks. Lines like these could have sounded corny, but Hopkins makes them dance off the screen with an unusually dainty performance, a Welsh Zen master doing a lot with very little.
