When one is a child, the world is seen at its clearest—its most straightforward. Because of their innocence and a lack of understanding the “need” to cater to artifice, it is the child who, so often, sees things as they are and for what they are. Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), the sixth-grader at the center of James Gray’s autobiographical coming-of-age story, Armageddon Time, is just such a kid. And what he sees all around him at his Queens public school in 1980 is discrimination. Specifically against a Black classmate he befriends named Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb). Because Johnny’s already been held back a year, their teacher, Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk)—a last name that gets plenty of comedic mileage—is even more blatantly prone to not caring about his academic growth. Plus, he’s Black, so what does his education really matter, right? Paul himself is Jewish, susceptible to racial discrimination in his own right (cough, cough—Ye), but still somewhat relishes the perk of having white skin.
This is why, when Paul draws a picture of Turkeltaub’s face atop a turkey’s body and is forced to confess to it, he doesn’t really get in all that much trouble. Yet when Johnny is forced to join in the same punishment of wiping the blackboard in front of the class while Turkeltaub continues to teach, he’s the one automatically blamed for making the other students laugh behind Turkeltaub’s back when it is, in fact, Paul who does a whimsical, mocking dance to make them do so. It is subtle “nuances” like these (what are known as “microaggressions” in the present), building up slowly and cringingly, that all add up to one big racist shitshow throughout the film (and, of course, in life).
In the backdrop of it all, the presidential election is imminent, with Ronald Reagan campaigning openly as an “evangelical Christian”—at least, per the interview he gives to Jim Bakker, one that Gray opts to include at a moment when Paul’s family is watching TV. During it, Reagan ominously warns of how ceding leadership in the 80s to Democrats a.k.a. “non-Christians” will result in all hell breaking loose. Thus, his wielding of a favorite keyword when he tells Bakker, “If we let this be another Sodom and Gomorrah… we might be the generation that sees Armageddon.” Bakker couldn’t be more in agreement when he adds, “This is the most important election ever to face the United States.”
And, at that time, it was. For it would change the entire trajectory of American values for good. Where there might have been a chance to decelerate the coveting of all things material, the unabashed worship of capitalism. As Jimmy Carter tried to do in his famed “Crisis of Confidence” speech in July of 1979. Months before what he said was apparently too much for White America to hear when it opted to shift toward the other side of the political spectrum entirely.
All because Carter “dared” to say, “It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper, than gasoline lines or energy shortages. Deeper even than inflation or recession… Some people have wasted energy, but others haven’t had anything to waste.” This referring to the phenomenon so overtly presented in Armageddon Time—that those without privileges to begin with never notice much difference when it all goes to shit for “the elite” (which, obviously, it never really can—what’s losing a few hundred thousand to a millionaire, or a couple million to a billionaire?). Carter went on to gently chastise the nation for what it was solidifying into as he favored the “no candy for you” approach to speech-giving by declaring, “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”
Evidently, though, owning and consuming things was satisfactory enough for Reagan supporters who then vindictively took America into what would become known as the Decade of Excess. At least for white yuppies. For average Americans, most especially the Black population, the system patently working against them would only worsen. Yet simultaneously be all the more accepted, especially by people like Paul’s family, who condemn it amid finding their own ways to profit from it.
As Carter concluded the speech that would be too much for Americans who loved sugar-coating, it was plain to see that, like the Republicans and the evangelists they courted in the 1980 election, Carter believed, “We are at a turning point in our history.” An “Armageddon time,” if you will. Unlike the conservatives, however, Carter believed it was because “the path it leads to [is] fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. It is a certain route to failure.” And here America is some forty-three years later fulfilling Carter’s all too real prophecy. One that Gray himself is highly aware of, and is certain to make his viewers comprehend that part of why the nation is where it’s at today is because of the past. Appropriately, Paul’s beloved grandfather, Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), is the one to remind him that you should never forget your past, because it always ends up haunting you in the present. Which is precisely what has happened to the United States politically. Paying for the sins of the Reagan Era as it continues to embrace them. Including the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
On that note, while the Trump family is not as central to the story as certain reviews might lead one to believe, Fred Trump’s (John Diehl) peripheral presence at the private school where Paul ends up is a key aspect to absorbing the hypocrisy of an institution that calls its attendees future “leaders” because of all the “hard work” they’re doing and the ambition they have. Ambition that wouldn’t mean anything without the very privilege of their backgrounds. And clearly, Fred’s looming presence over the school had a pronounced effect on Gray, who incorporates a scene of Paul’s first day of school being vaguely tainted by Fred homing in on him in the hallway. As Gray recalled, “Fred was on the board of trustees of the school, and he would sort of stand in the halls, his arms folded. I walked in with my attaché case and he saw me as weird immediately. He had prospective parents to show the school to, and here was the little Jew with the suitcase.”
The private school in Armageddon Time is called Forest Manor, while the real-life one is Kew-Forest School. Where, needless to say, Donald Trump was also an attendee (until his father put him in a military academy at thirteen after he threw a desk in the middle of Jackie Robinson Parkway, called Interboro Parkway when Donald decided to tamper with it). So was his older sister, Maryanne Trump (portrayed briefly but effectively by Jessica Chastain). The alumna who shows up to give a speech about success to the current students, an event that Gray can confirm actually transpired while he was attending the school (basing Chastain’s monologue off of memory). And while Gray might not have fully grasped what was happening around him as a child, he did confirm, “I’ll tell you what was obvious to me at the time. When Maryanne Trump came to give a speech at school, I remember very clearly being like, ‘What the fuck? What is she talking about?’ Because I was like, ‘You’re really rich, lady. What’s the problem?’ I remember thinking that. The [old] joke, ‘born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.’”
Paul’s reluctance to attend the same private school as his brother, Ted (Ryan Sell), is, in large part, because of how much he values his friendship with Johnny. Yet, at the same time, he doesn’t value it enough to stick up for Johnny when he’s flagrantly treated “lesser than.” Even by people of his own race. An instance that occurs when Paul and Johnny are on the subway together and the latter talks of going to Florida to become an astronaut as he looks at the space-oriented collectibles he received from his stepbrother who lives there. Overhearing the conversation, a Black passenger leaving the train feels the need to inform Johnny of his NASA ambitions, “The won’t even your Black ass in through the back door.” But maybe he was only trying to spare Johnny the later pain of indulging in a dream. Dreams that only white kids get to have. This extending to Paul’s desire to become an artist.
Although “discouraged” by his parents, Esther (Anne Hathaway) and Irving (Jeremy Strong), Paul’s grandfather urges him to follow through with that dream, even buying him a professional paint set. By the same token, the burden of knowing that Paul’s still just another “Jew boy,” likely to be excluded once a certain “quota” is met, prompts Aaron to contradictorily advocate for Paul’s enrollment at Forest Manor. Especially after being caught smoking weed in the bathroom with Johnny, of whom Esther regards with ostensibly racist sentiments. Something Paul calls her out for. She, in turn, incites Irving to beat the shit out of him as punishment for his illegal activity.
At the core of the “unpleasantness” of it all is the fact that white liberals are as guilty as any conservative for allowing systemic racism to thrive. Benefitting from the “getting ahead” advantages of that system themselves. As Gray puts it, “…you can be both the oppressor and oppressed at the same time.” Paul becomes more than just “faintly” cognizant of that when he’s put in a position that finds him facing the ultimate moral dilemma by the end of the movie. And maybe, in his mind, he wouldn’t have been faced with that dilemma if he had evaded the clutches of Forest Manor. The first day he’s made to attend, he seethes to his father, “You just want me to be like you.” Irving responds, “No, I don’t want you to be like me. I want you to be so much better.” This is the very type of parental thinking that only perpetuates the system’s flourishment. For every generation of white liberals ends up succumbing to its seduction. The promise of, “Your kids can have what you never did. But you have to play the game.” And now, so do their children—permitting the cycle to persist.
Somewhere between The Squid and the Whale and Triangle of Sadness, Armageddon Time is in the middle of the Venn diagram. With the former still being among the greatest New York-based coming-of-age films and the latter being a scathing diatribe on privilege. With Armageddon Time’s integration of race and the varying strata of whiteness that allows for “success,” it can readily be classified as a unique and vital addition to the coming-of-age canon.
Moreover, it isn’t just Paul that comes of age (via a jaded comprehension of “how the world works”) by the end of the movie, but so does the America we know today. The one where “racism doesn’t exist” and “everyone is equal,” but the masses are tacitly attuned to the reality that it’s still a matter of working a broken and, yes, highly inequitable system if one wants to get that coveted “leg up.”
Encapsulating the commingling of Paul’s coming of age with that of neoliberal capitalism’s in 1980s America, Gray noted, “You can’t monetize integrity, and it’s become a catastrophe, because you find that someone like Donald Trump is completely transactional, right? ‘What can you do for me? If you do this for me, I’ll do it for you.’ Everything’s about the brutality of the exchange of goods and services. At some point, life is more than that. And I saw this story as being representative of something bigger.” That it is, dear viewer, that it is.
