It's fitting that "Armageddon Time," James Gray's quietly anguished movie about events from his own childhood, begins with a kid arriving at a school and ends with him departing another. In between those bookending images, 11-year-old Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) receives an education of a cruel and costly order, though he isn't the one who ultimately bears the cost — or the cruelty. Set in Queens, New York, in the autumn of 1980, with an uneasy chill in the air and the first Reagan administration on the horizon, the film is an epic of boyhood disillusionment, what you might call a coming-of-rage story, in which Paul's eyes are opened to the hard realities of systemic injustice and his own silent complicity.
That might make this movie, Gray's eighth feature as a writer-director, sound like a predictable exercise in liberal hand-wringing — a chance to shake our heads at another ugly spectacle of American racism from a safe, sanctimonious distance. But if "Armageddon Time" seems to hew to a familiar playbook, it also avoids trafficking in the complacency, reassurance and false equivalencies that most Hollywood explorations of race and class are eager to peddle. It doesn't evade every trap or trapping of convention, but its tenderness of touch is matched by a remarkable toughness of mind.
For the close admirer of Gray's work, this should come as no surprise. Often hailed as an old-fashioned Hollywood classicist, he has also become an increasingly sly and subversive one. His lush melodrama "The Immigrant" (2013), very much a companion to this movie, dismantled the romantic foundations of the typical American Dream narrative, in much the same way that "The Lost City of Z" (2016) turned the triumphant conventions of the hero's journey on their head. In "Armageddon Time," there's nothing especially rose-tinted about the lens through which he peers back at his early life, and not just because of the heavy shadows and muted colors that abound in Darius Khondji's widescreen images.
