CANNES, France — The title of James Gray's "Armageddon Time," which premiered in competition Thursday night at the 75th annual Cannes Film Festival, is a wry reference to a comment made by Ronald Reagan during his first presidential campaign: "We may be the generation that sees Armageddon," he said in a conversation with the televangelist Jim Bakker. It was one of Reagan's many invocations of the end times both before and during his presidency, to the alarm of many, including religious leaders who felt he was using the Bible to justify and precipitate a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
We see that televised moment through the wide, naive eyes of Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth-grader growing up in a Jewish household in Queens, New York, and a stand-in for the young Gray himself. The distance and specificity of the movie's 1980 setting serve as a reminder, troubling as well as reassuring, that every era has its false doomsday prophets, and every generation imagines it might be humanity's last. It's not the only way in which history resonates anew in "Armageddon Time," a coming-of-age drama that feels both tenderly observed and acutely, rigorously pessimistic about its moment, as well as ours.
The present-day catastrophe of Russia's war on Ukraine throws inevitably somber shadows over the movie's lightly sketched Cold War time frame, as well as the fact that Gray is of Ukrainian Jewish descent. (That detail is briefly noted when Paul's beloved grandfather, played by a moving if miscast Anthony Hopkins, recalls an antisemitic attack on his own grandparents in their Ukrainian hometown.) And despite its richly detailed rendering of graffiti-smeared subway trains, dilapidated public-school classrooms and the Graffs' dimly lit Flushing row house, "Armageddon Time" sometimes ceases to feel like a period piece at all, insofar as it touches on white privilege, Black punishment, Republican fearmongering, the Trump family and the many, many forms and gradations of American injustice.
