![]() Paul genuinely likes Johnny they hang out, play hooky and get into some minor scrapes. He has one friend in public school, Johnny, a bused-in Black kid who lives in a cheap apartment with his senile grandmother. Paul’s mother can be chilly at times his father, physically brutal.Īnd Paul himself is no hero. This is not a movie filled with much old-school Yiddish (the Jewish grandfather in this story was born in England, and is played by Anthony Hopkins). In fact, “Armageddon Time” has a quite opposite agenda: To make us confront the past, and our own personal history, and perhaps acknowledge some sometimes-embarrassing truths. And, playing to the mass audience he has always understood, it’s about leaving the theater in a better mood than when you came in. Because “The Fabelmans” is, like so many Spielberg stories, about recognizing and forgiving flaws, in others and ourselves. Hell, even Sammy and the bigoted bully at school make up. Perhaps because her own dreams of a musical career have been stifled, she supports her son’s movie-making obsession he adores her in response, but with such dangerously uncritical worship he’s devastated when he learns she is not as perfect as he dreams.īut they make up. One who does, though, is Sammy’s mother, played with heartbreaking grace by Michelle Williams (whose tremulous line readings, very appropriately, conjure up the wounded vibrato of Judy Garland). Few supporting characters, including the villainous anti-Semites at school, feel real. (It is, after all, called “The Fabelmans.”) When Sammy’s long-lost great-uncle reappears, he’s a thick schmear of schmaltz, a Yiddish cliché straight from the Borscht Belt when Sammy has his first date, it’s with a sexy, cartoonishly ultra-religious gentile who can’t decide whether she wants to swap spit or save his soul. Spielberg’s movie is about memory, and embraces the exaggerations of family lore. And in each, the young man has a random encounter with a celebrity - Fred Trump in Gray’s story, John Ford in Spielberg’s - which leaves a lasting impression.īut once you get past those odd similarities, the movies diverge widely. In each, the loss shakes the hero’s mother deeply. In each film, an older relative dies: in Gray’s story, his maternal grandfather in Spielberg’s, his maternal grandmother. The mothers are unfulfilled and emotionally fragile. In each family, the main character is a boy whose artistic yearnings go largely unappreciated. They focus on culturally East Coast, secularly Jewish families (Gray grew up in 1970s Queens Spielberg spent his early years in 1950s Haddon Township). Which is why it’s fascinating that two largely opposite filmmakers have made two seemingly similar movies.īoth begin in childhood (although Gray’s film stays there Spielberg’s continues into his protagonist’s late teens). The characters in his melodramas tend to be morally compromised when his explorers venture into outer space or the jungle, they’re likely only to discover disappointment.Ī typical Gray shot? Someone looking down or away, in embarrassment or regret. ![]() Yet while, like Spielberg, he worked in a variety of genres - crime movies, period pieces, adventures, sci-fi - he also distrusted the old heroic formula. ![]() Gray didn’t share his contemporaries’ deliberate self-consciousness or sick humor. Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins co-star in James Gray’s “Armageddon Time.”
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