A movie memoir by a self-hating white American is just another chapter in Hollywood’s progressive project.
James Gray’s memoir-movie Armageddon Time is set in 1980, the social turning point when American pop music emerged from disco’s euphoria, American pop movies entered their final phase of self-examination, Star Wars juvenile escapism caught fire, and Ronald Reagan won election from feckless Jimmy Carter, confirming the startling promise that any American can be president of the United States. This all changed the aspirational prospects for Gray’s generation — especially middle-class white kids growing up in Queens, N.Y., not far from Donald Trump’s boyhood stomping grounds.
Eleven-year-old Paul Graff, the film’s James Gray figure, is the son of second-generation Jews. We know he’s artistic, unlike his school-assistant mother (Anne Hathaway) and plumber father (Jeremy Strong), and we know he’s sensitive, because puny redhead Banks Repeta makes Paul girly and delicate. Outlier status connects Paul to the surly, outspoken, foul-mouthed black kid, Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb); both are picked on by an oafish white homeroom teacher whose animus toward Johnny gives Paul/James his first inklings about institutional racism.
Johnny fascinates Paul/James with new music by the Sugarhill Gang (“Rapper’s Delight”). Unlike that band of good-time rhymers, Johnny is a hard-luck case from a proverbial broken family. But Paul has a good role model in his immigrant grandfather, Aaron (Anthony Hopkins, phonier than both grandparents in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast). When Paul’s social-climbing parents enroll him in Queens’s Forest Manor Prep School, he betrays Johnny in front of several snotty, bigoted boys in school uniforms. Grandpa reprimands: “Be a mensch! Don’t be nervous, be bold!” But Paul can only muster guilt while Johnny, homeless, unprotected, and with a symbolic bleeding foot, becomes the film’s sacrificial Negro and slips into the carceral system. “Nobody’s gonna stand up for me but me!” Johnny cries. He becomes what southerners call a “haint” in Gray’s self-consciousness about race.
Armageddon Time reminds us that there were no black kids in those John Hughes films that gave the ’80s their first fresh identity — and that the movies were better off for that omission. Independent filmmakers would answer that lack, leveling the field with tales of marginal, outsider experiences to complement those white, largely suburban-set movies. The charm of the John Hughes vision is that everyone could see himself in that idealization. Certainly every Baby Boomer identified with that innocent sexual aggression (for boys and girls) in Sixteen Candles and the dissent from authority in The Breakfast Club that made one align personally with little Kevin’s paradisiacal independence in Home Alone. This nationwide compassion happened maybe for the last time before Hollywood came to use diversity against us and emphasize new, self-justifying, race-based segregation.
Gray is of that totalitarian “diversity, equity, and inclusion” school. Once again, he reaches for hipness and significance that are not true to his skills or experience; they’re just a high-minded, visually second-rate pose. Did eleven-year-olds who read Highlights magazine also listen to 1980’s London Calling by Britain’s political punk band the Clash? Or is Gray latching on to a hipster totem? His soundtrack plays the Clash’s reggae tune “Armagideon Time” (the B-side from the single “London Calling”) for its lyric “A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight.” But the Clash’s identification with reggae and Rastafarianism is not synonymous with American pop culture. (Better if Gray had shown Paul and Johnny’s Huck-and-Jim affinity by sneaking them into Francis Coppola’s boy movies The Outsiders or Rumble Fish.)
Instead, Armageddon Time betrays Gray’s background. Its indictment of American injustice (starting with old folks rejecting Reagan’s election) desires national annihilation. Reducing the battle between good and evil to a condemnation of Forest Manor Prep School (a stand-in for the Kew-Forest prep school that Donald Trump attended) provides a cheap opportunity for Trump-bashing: Two extraneous episodes feature relatives Fred Trump (John Diehl) and Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain) delivering skeptical advice. An assembly address (“You are the elite”) prompts the eleven-year-old hero to walk out in protest.
This is poisoned nostalgia, Gray’s semi-autobiographical apology tour, part of liberal Hollywood’s progressive project that would have Americans remake themselves by condemning their past. The grungy Funny Pages is more honest, as is Dito Montiel’s brief series of low-budget autobiographical films set in Queens. Armageddon Time announces: There’s a new brat pack in America, professing “justice,” who hate themselves.
