A look at Armageddon Time (R)
The Eighties seem like a fair way back now, but for many of us they were our prime years in family life and the work environment.
Here, we’ve got a sixth-grader Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) who is in his final few weeks of primary school in Queens, New York. It’s 1980. Paul befriends an African American classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb) and the pair play street games and throw a few hoops on the local basketball courts.
Mum Esther (Anne Hathaway) and Dad Irving (Jeremy Strong) are busy consolidating their middle-class life in a prosperous suburb.
Paul and Johnny get into some minor classroom strife when they address their teacher, Mr Turkletaub (Andrew Poly) as ‘Mr Turkey’.
But it’s when Johnny introduces his new buddy to cannabis – they smoke a joint or two in the school toilets – that Paul gets into real trouble: at school and at home.
They’ve been sprung, so Esther goes with her son to the headmaster’ office. She’s a home economics teacher herself and a PTA (Parents-Teachers Association) officer, but her pleas fail to save Paul from school justice.
But it’s when he gets home that Paul is dealt with by his hot water and boiler repairman father Irving.
Refusing to identify Johnny as the source of the cannabis Paul cops a few whacks around the head and shoulders from Irving’s belt as he crouches, terrified, in a shower recess.
Loving Granddad Aaron Rabinowitz (Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins) consoles Paul and one day after school they head to a neighbourhood park where the Grade 6 boy fires a rocket from its launch pad bottle.
But it’s no ordinary toy rocket. At its zenith it disintegrates and the remains float back to earth via a tiny parachute.
The primary school years end and Paul heads off to a prestigious private school to start his secondary school years.
He’s not cut adrift from Johnny, though. The deprived teenager meets Paul in the evenings in the boy’s family garden shed and they discuss what’s been going on and what they can come up with.
The new secondary schoolboy comes up with a scheme to help Johnny’s dire financial situation.
Desktop computers are just coming in (remember it’s 1980) so why don’t they sneak into Paul’s new e-classroom and pinch one, keyboard and all. They manage to get away with a tiny bit of trouble and anxiety, but make it to a pawnbrokers’ shop a few streets away.
Expecting a reasonable dollar return they’re dismayed when the pawnbroker rings the cops.
After a bit of a chase in two directions, the patrolmen nail the two lads and they’re carted off to the slammer.
It’s what happens in the police building, when Dad Irving comes into the picture again, that the difference between a middle class white boy and a struggling African-American teenager living with his grandmother is thrown into sharp focus. Reform school isn’t specifically mentioned but it looms large as the movie winds down.
Anthony Hopkins is perfectly cast as the loving, supportive grandfather. He’s in his 80s in the movie and in real life Hopkins turns 85 this New Year’s Eve.
Note: originally this movie was classified CTC at our local arthouse cinema. So what’s CTC stand for? Well, it means Check The Classification but other cinema listings now have it as an ‘R’.
australianrules.com.au 