CANNES – James Gray’s new film, “Armageddon Time,” is an autobiographical tale recounting the systematic racism he witness at the age of 12-years-old over four decades ago. His parents are played by Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, while he’s reimagined as Paul, an artistic dreamer portrayed by Banks Repeta. The film centers on a friendship with Johnny, played by the fantastic Jaylin Webb, who is clearly a victim of discrimination at their New York City public school. It’s the most personal film of Gray’s career and he was pretty frank about why it took him so long to tackle this particular subject matter during a press conference following “Time’s” premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
“The very grim fact is I’m no longer 29-years-old and when you get old you start to look back,” Gray says. “I love telling stories to my children. Well, I used to, they don’t want me to anymore. And I used to tell them childhood stories and they asked me to take them back to where I grew up and we went. And there was very little evidence that I had ever lived there or my parents or grandparents had been there and all of a sudden it felt like a ghost story wanting to come out. That was my thesis of it and then it’s been in my mind ever since.”
The Focus Features release also takes place at an infection point in American history. A political, societal, and cultural backdrop that haunts the proceedings. A mood, based on Gray’s comments, that clearly influenced the film’s title.
“My memory of it, at least as a 12-year-old, at the time, was that…Muhammad Ali was a big hero of mine and he lost in a very humiliating fashion to Larry Holmes that fall,” Gray says. “And a few months later John Lennon was murdered and Ronald Reagan became president. And my mother would say ‘There’s going to be a nuclear war.’ She’d constantly say that. And a feeling of armageddon was just sitting on the family. And it was also the beginning of a market is god idea where if you look at the rise of inequality, and that is a world issue, really, it began about 1979, 1980. It’s an inflection point in history that I think it’s quite underrated, at least, so far. And also, of course, what it means for cinema. It was the end of the new Hollywood and a certain type of film that I really love and am very passionate about and feel an obligation to try and continue.”
Strong, who may soon repeat as an Emmy-winner for “Succession,” plays a father figure from a very different era. He’s a repairman fixated on making sure his sons have a better life by getting them into a private school and steering them towards more lucrative professions. The film also features, of all people, real-life New York historical figures such as Fred Trump (yes, that one’s father) and Maryanne Trump (that one’s sister). Their inclusion is an attempt by Gray to show how much wealthy families have influenced the city for decades. Strong hadn’t been conscious of the thematic connections between “Time” and the HBO masterpiece while filming, but admits, “it’s interesting because you can find a thread connecting these two worlds.”
“I mean I think as an actor you sort of enter into a piece, so ‘Succession’ doesn’t exist when we’re in this world,” Strong says. “But the faultiness that we see starting to crack in the small ways in this film that are actually enormous ways widen and widen and widen and become the political and social and racial divisions in our society and the world today in microcosm in this film. The television show I work on, which is in so many ways about late-stage capitalism and terminal decadence in the United States, certainly you can find the prefiguration in a way, the genome of it, in this film. It’s a really interesting parallel you’ve drawn.”
Hathaway portrays a mother whose aspirations of running for the local school board are stymied by her son’s behavior at school. The Oscar winner was asked if she enjoyed playing a very Jewish mother. Her response was obvious.
“Who wouldn’t? It was an honor. My husband is Jewish and we spoke a great deal about what this would mean but also to represent an art but also what it would represent our family,” Hathaway says. “My mother-in-law, who passed away recently, was simply the greatest Jewish mother I’ve ever seen. Her legacy influences my life in The hand of a Jewish mother I’ve ever seen. And her legacy influences my life in profound ways that I am truly, truly grateful for. And the hand of a Jewish mother will guide the rest of my life. And if I have done one thing and it is to capture that love and I honestly won’t even attempt to put it into words. And that’s why I am so grateful to cinema because it allows you to say things without words.”
Gray has a lot to say in the film about white privilege, systematic racism, and economic inequality in the film. And, if these media gathering was any indication, he’s going to have a lot to say on its eventual press tour as well. He remarks, “I think we’re in serious trouble today, don’t you? Why happened? How did we get here?
There are like two people who own everything? There are a bunch of authoritarians that are trying to take over the planet. How did we get here? It didn’t happen by accident.”
He continues, “I’m not advertising for Soviet-style Communism because I went to the Soviet Union in 1984 and it was completely broken. But you least had some other system. Today, it’s the market. The market is god. You tell someone who is under 20 you’re a sell-out they think it means you have no tickets left. They don’t know what it means. So, where does that leave us? The whole point is to inspire creativity. To inspire a world that is creating artists at a rapid rate and instead what we teach is ‘Oh, that’s a good franchise.’ We used to think about franchise as McDonald’s and Burger King. And now we talk about it as cinema. What happened? Something happened. Why aren’t we talking about that more? Where is the critique of capitalism itself that has led to a system of tremendous inequality? So, When you ask me about where we are today it’s deep trouble and it’s up to artists to show what’s wrong because it’s not coming from anywhere else I can tell you that.”
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