‘Armageddon Time’, a portrait of white privilege, stirs Cannes

When the Cannes Film Festival audience stood to applaud James Gray’s richly observed autobiographical drama Armageddon Time, about the director’s own 1980s childhood in Queens, Gray’s voice quivered as he addressed the crowd.

“It’s my story, in a way,” said Gray. “And you guys shared it with me.”

“It took every last bit of control not to burst out into tears,” Gray said, still recovering the next day in Cannes. “It’s been a really strange journey making the film and my father died two months ago of Covid. The whole process has been fraught and filled with emotion.”

Armageddon Time, starring Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, has stirred Cannes like no other American film at the festival this year. Gray’s movie, which Focus Features will distribute in the U.S. later this year, has been received as a tender triumph for the New York filmmaker of The Immigrant and Ad Astra not just for his detailed excavation of his childhood but for how the film reexamines his own white privilege growing up — how race and money can tip the scales in the formative years of young people.

Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is a sixth-grader modeled after the 53-year-old Gray in a middle-class Jewish family. At school, Paul’s friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb) is a Black kid with fewer advantages, who’s treated differently than Paul. When Paul’s family elects to send him to a private school, the gap only grows. Connections to today’s inequities aren’t hard to decipher. At the private school, Jessica Chastain makes a cameo as Maryanne Trump, sister to Donald and an assistant U.S. attorney.

For Gray, Armageddon Time is period film about now, and a coming home after two far-flung films in the Amazon-set The Lost City of Z and the space adventure Ad Astra.

Excerpts from the interview:

When did Armageddon Time start formulating in your head?

I was at an art exhibit in Los Angeles five years ago. Painted on the wall it said: “History and myth begin in the microcosm of the personal.” I had made this film before this where I went into space. It was a very difficult movie to make and a very difficult movie to complete. The end result was not fully mine. That was a very sad experience for me. I wanted to try to rediscover my love for the medium and why I wanted it do it in the first place. I said, “Screw it, I’ll make the most personal film I can.”

You’ve called 1980 one of the most pivotal years in American history. Is that because of the election of Reagan?

People don’t remember that he campaigned in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which is where Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney were killed by the Klan. And he started talking about states rights. He knew exactly what he was doing. I understand he didn’t come out and say the N-word. He didn’t come out and be Trump completely. But that was his purpose. I feel like that was planting the seeds for a kind of corporatist, me-first, top-down, frankly rooted in racism idea of American capitalism that hasn’t left us fully since. When you propose a system which is all about money, it has the basis of oppression built into it. It didn’t start with slavery. It started with the indigenous people who were basically vaporized. We’re very good at genocide.

These aren’t the normal inward-looking themes of memoir films.

It’s my obligation to continue trying to do the work that I’m doing. Not out of ego or any feeling of “I’m the best” or anything but because the type of cinema that I like, I’d like to think there’s at least somebody out there that likes it, too. And who is speaking for them? The question is: Are you going to pursue with passion what it is you dream about, what you hope for? Or are you going to give in? I’d love to be richer or more powerful or whatever. But if it’s not to be, I’m OK with that. I’d rather just pursue my dreams.