Paul Graff is a dreamy and somewhat spoiled boy just before puberty. His parents don’t get along with him. The father is a plumber, the mother a home economics teacher with political ambitions; her upwardly mobile family has never forgiven her for not being a marriage befitting her status. The mother sees a lot of herself in Paul; the father suspects that the son despises him. Only the grandfather has a connection to the boy. But when Paul is caught smoking cannabis in the school toilet, it’s the grandfather who suggests that Paul be sent to a private school where more discipline is required and gives the money for it.
Johnny is raised badly by his grandmother. He’s the class clown, he got stuck, the teacher doesn’t like him. From the start, Paul and Johnny get along well. After the episode with the joint, however, they part ways. In an effort not to attract attention at the new elite school, Paul disowns his friend.
But when Johnny’s grandmother has dementia and he is supposed to come to a home, he wants to run away and asks Paul to come with him. To raise money for the adventure, Paul suggests stealing a computer from his school. Of course they get caught. But because Paul’s father once repaired the boiler for one of the police officers for free, the boy is let go. Johnny will take all the blame and probably disappear forever in the system of prison, petty crime and hopelessness. Paul must live with the guilt of having his friend put to the knife to save his future.
Director and screenwriter James Gray presents Armageddon Time, an autobiographical coming-of-age drama that thrives on the almost uncanny performance of Banks Repeta. How someone who claims to be a skateboarder, surfer, ocean swimmer, spear fish, play guitar, and practice tae kwon do can play the introverted dreamer Paul so vividly, makes you believe in the wonder of acting again.
“All idiots!”
And that would actually be all that could be said about the film if Gray hadn’t loaded it with political messages. Because he lets the film play in 1980 in the New York borough of Queens. In the final shot of the film, Paul’s family sits in front of the television, shocked: Ronald Reagan has won the presidential election. “All idiots, from coast to coast,” comments Paul’s father. Because the Graffs are Jews. And then, by tradition, the majority of Jews voted for the Democratic candidate, as they do to this day: only 24 percent of American Jews voted for Trump in 2016.
Johnny, on the other hand, is black. A class drama suddenly turns into a race drama, in which the Graffs are on the morally wrong – the white – side. Paul’s private school is also sponsored by Fred C. Trump, father of the future president; At the start of the school year, Judge Maryanne Trump speaks to the students, Donald’s sister. Tadah!
Michael Banks Repeta as Paul Graff and Anthony Hopkins as Grandfather Aaron Rabinowitz in Times of Upheaval
Which: Anne Joyce/Focus Features
As critic Tim Grierson noted in Screen Daily, Gray’s film is “drenched in the filmmaker’s grief” at “how he and the people he loved contributed to an unjust society”; Critic David Katz said the film explores how “a family like the Graffs, who have themselves experienced discrimination, can be completely blind to their own racism”; for critic Peter Bradshaw, Paul is simply a “quasi-Trump”.
That’s unfair to the Graffs’ real models and to Gray’s film, which works in a much more differentiated way. Paul’s family is held together by the memories of persecution and murder, by the unconditional desire for advancement and by the responsibility of the generations for one another. Yes, the father is probably a racist; the mother and grandfather are very explicitly not. You want to give your child the best chance; they invest in his future. To denounce this as a “contribution to an unjust society”, as blindness to racism, even as Trumpism, is simply mean.
Johnny fails because of the color of his skin, of course. But he also fails because he doesn’t have a family that takes care of him, loves him and therefore disciplines him. As early as sixth grade, he decided that everyone was against him, and he acted accordingly. The Graffs can’t save him; Paul is no little Trump, but he is no saint either. One cannot, indeed must not, see Gray’s film as an indictment of his family, but in the sense of Bertolt Brecht’s dictum: “Unfortunate is the country that needs heroes.”
One minor annoyance to note: with Anne Hathaway as the mother, Jeremy Strong as the father, and Anthony Hopkins as the grandfather, Gray cast non-Jews as the key members of the family, although all the supporting Jewish roles are played by Jews, such as the tyrannical elementary school teacher Turkeltaub (great : Andrew Polk).
Anne Hathaway as Esther Graff in “Times of Upheaval”
Which: Anne Joyce/Focus Features
Of course, non-Jews can and should play Jews, just as Jews can play non-Jews. But Hopkins can’t. When he drums into his grandson, in his Welsh-tinted Shakespearean English, to always stand up against racism—”today it’s the blacks, tomorrow they’ll stab you in the ribs”—it comes across as being said, not as a specifically Jewish experience . An experience in which, contrary to what the film suggests, the majority of American Jews have always acted, not just in their voting behavior.
Incidentally, the Reagan years were a time of new beginnings for blacks. Eddy Murphy, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey began their careers; the first black mayors were elected in Chicago and Philadelphia; in 1984, Jesse Jackson was the first black – and incidentally anti-Semitic – presidential candidate. Under Reagan, the income of the top quintile of African Americans grew faster than that of white households. Of course, that left four fifths behind, with the Johnnys of this world at the bottom.
“The system is unfair,” says Paul’s grandfather. Right. And you can’t blame those who are trying to escape the underclass, black or white.