«Armageddon Time», the torments of the young Paul and a mother who is too fragile – Corriere.it

Paul Nizan in «Aden Arabia» he didn’t want to let anyone say that i twenty years I am the best age of life. James Gray, in «Armageddon Time» lowers the bar even further, to demonstrate that neither adolescence it’s such an age carefree as you believe. Especially if you turn twelve in a family of middle-class American Jews, while Reagan prepares to defeat Carter at the elections. To experience all this on one’s own skin is the young Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta), not exactly blameless second son of a father plumber (Jeremy Strong) and a mom (Anne Hathaway) with too many signs of psychological fragility and in which it is evident that the director (also author of the screenplay) has put a lot of his life into it. If not bringing on stage precise episodes of his own autobiographyat least i can be found major moral issues that that boy has to face, starting with the difference of class and race to continue with the weight of tradition and theevaporation of values on which that tradition seemed to have built.

To put her own before Paul’s eyes «privileges»right on the benches of a public school, it is friendship with Johnny (Jaylin Webb), a black age with whom the young Graff does every kind of thing imaginable transgression but from which the two friends do not emerge in the same way, because the teachers’ reaction is much more severe with the black student. Nor do things look any better at home, where Paul seems busy to fight with all his family: his older brother Ted (Ryan Sell) who attends the prestigious Kew-Forest School and with whom he never gets along; the father who seems to be ashamed of his condition as a small craftsman and dreams only of class jump for her children, perhaps taking the belt off her pants to let Paul try it on, while the mother seems to lack those qualities that would allow her to face the more critical situations.

Alone with grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins) the little one has a real filial relationship: he talks to him, she trusts him and he listens to life lessons, as well as the story of how his family fled persecution in the Ukraine to finally arrive in New York, Queens. And just to stand out thecoveted class leap (after the umpteenth act of scholastic insubordination: a joint in the toilets with Johnny), Paul is changed from school and enrolled, thanks to the tuition paid by his grandfather, in the much more prestigious institute frequented by his brother, where a different type of atmosphere can already be breathed from the uniform.

Not quite the one dreamed of by the little Graff he owes immediately reckon with the racism and it snobbery of his companions. And with that of the most influential sponsor of the school, Fred Trump (father of the future President Donald), spokesman for the competitive and careerist spirit which the daughter Maryanne, sister of Donald (a cameo by Jessica Chastain) spells out to the students gathered in assembly. So Paul, who would like to keep proletarian friendship with Johnny but also having to deal with his father’s classist anxiety, torn between his grandfather’s teachings and the contempt of his new companions, must choose not so much which side to take (because in his heart he has no doubts) as much as how to behave to get by as best as possible. Naturally ending up make the wrong choice.

The strength of the film, however, is not in a traditional (however captivating) history of coming of age
. To James Gray (who has more or less the conflicts with his father figure seems to have been told, starting with “Little Odessa») is of other interest: look into Paul’s eyes, and more generally those of America, to see the betrayal that that generation accomplished respect to values which he had always defended. Without wanting to attribute faults to this or that of him (even his father, with his ambitions
petty bourgeois is somehow acquitted) but rather to understand how a certain America he turned away to herself. Just like Paul does who learns to “forget” also my friend Johnny.