Movie review: Armageddon Time explores race relations in New York

In the coming of-age-drama Armageddon Time, American filmmaker James Gray returns to the New York roots he explored in earlier films such as The Yards (2000) and We Own the Night (2007).

Jaylin Webb, left, stars as Johnny Crocker and Michael Banks Repeta stars as Paul Graff in director James Gray's Armageddon Time. Picture: Focus Features

In the coming of-age-drama Armageddon Time, American filmmaker James Gray returns to the New York roots he explored in earlier films such as The Yards (2000) and We Own the Night (2007).

His previous film, Ad Astra (2019), is set in outer space but it does share a common theme with his hometown stories: the astronaut (Brad Pitt) has a complicated relationship with his father.

The semi-autobiographical lead character is 12-year-old Paul Graff (an impressive Banks ­Repeta). He wants to be an artist when he grows up.

His father Irving (Jeremy Strong, in a far different role to the TV series Succession) is a short-fused plumber and his mother Esther (Anne Hathaway) is a home economics teacher.

He is close to his maternal grandfather, Aaron Rabinowitz (dual Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins). He is not close to his older brother Ted (Ryan Sell).

The time is 1980 and the setting is Queens, New York. Paul has started sixth grade at a public school. He befriends an African American classmate named Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who wants to be an astronaut.

This friendship between a middle-class white Jewish boy and a poor black boy is central to the story. Everything changes when they are busted for smoking dope in the school toilets.

Johnny, who lives with his grandmother, drops out of school and Paul is sent to the private prep school his brother attends.

On his first day, he is greeted in the corridors by Fred Trump (John Diehl), father of the future president. Soon afterwards, his daughter, the lawyer Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain), delivers a gee-up speech to the assembled school, telling the pupils they are the future rulers of America.

The school is called Forest Manor. Maryanne and Donald Trump attended Kew Forest prep school, so not hard to join the dots there.

When Johnny swings by the schoolyard and is spotted by its white inhabitants, Paul rebuffs his friend. One of his new classmates asks, “Did you allow a n...er in your house?”

There is a lot percolating under the surface of this 115-minute movie. At its centre is race, religion, class and privilege.

Paul thinks his family is rich but his father knows otherwise and resents it. A scene where he takes off his belt to discipline his son shows another side to him. His mother seems to be on hold, waiting for someone or something to lead her to a better life. “All my hopes are with you and your brother,’’ she tells Paul, to which he replies, “But we’re all still here.”

It is his grandfather who tells him the most truthful stories. He tells him to stand up for his black friend. The moments where he explains his family’s history — from fleeing persecution in Ukraine, to Liverpool, England, to Queens, New York — are honest and moving, with Hopkins at his best. All of the performances are strong, especially from the young star. But the overall story does not quite pull together the threads the director lets loose.

The title comes from a TV interview Californian governor Ronald Reagan did not long before he ran for president.

Talking about what he saw as anti-Christian liberal attitudes, he said, “We might be the generation that sees armageddon.” Watching this, Paul’s father says, “What a schmuck.”

Reagan did win the White House — “Morons from sea to shining sea,” Paul’s father says of the result — and that, for the director, is when armageddon time began. Hence his film draws a straight line from then to the rise of the Trump family.

In a media interview at the Cannes Film Festival, Gray said he believed “the seeds were planted” with the election of Reagan. Fair enough, that’s his view, but it feels too thin a premise to hold up this particular film. The result is a slow-burn drama that never quite ignites.

The Good Nurse (M)

Netflix

THree and a half stars

Eddie Redmayne as Charlie Cullen and Jessica Chastain as Amy Loughren in The Good Nurse.

Judged solely on the acting, The Good Nurse is a five-star film. Eddie Redmayne, free of JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts, reminds us why he has an Oscar on the mantelpiece(for his time as Stephen Hawking in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything).

He is Charles Cullen, the real life not-so-good nurse of the title, who is now 62 and serving 11 consecutive life sentencesin an American prison.

This 121-minute movie, set mainly in 1996, is based on Charles Graeber’s 2013 true crime book of the same title.

“For me this is the important part,’’ Charles says as he carefully washes the body of an elderly woman who has died in hospital. “Finding some dignity.”

However, it’s how and why the woman died that matters, and what the hospital, and all the hospitals Cullen worked for in his16 years as a nurse, did afterwards.

“He’s a very good nurse,’’ says his colleague Amy Loughren (an outstanding Jessica Chastain, who has her own Oscar for the2021 film The Eyes of Tammy Faye). “He wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.”

She is right. It was not a mistake.

Amy and Charles work the night shift in the intensive care unit at a hospital in New Jersey. They care for patients who areclinging to the edge of life.

There are two riveting scenes that I can see on an Oscars night highlight reel.

In the first, Amy meets Charles at a diner and asks him if the rumours are true: that he kills his patients. She says shewould understand if he did. Mercy killings is the suggestion.

Yet she is wearing a wire. The police are investigating an unexplained death at the ICU and she suspects Charles is responsible.His response suggests he has been asked such questions before.

In the second, as the case progresses, Charles is in an interrogation room being questioned by the detectives (Nnamdi Asomughaand Noah Emmerich). What he does makes them catch their breath.

Redmayne is incredible. In small movements — his eyes, his mouth, his hands — he shows us there is something unusual, somethingcreepy about Charles.

His performance reminds me of that of Evan Peters in the now-screening Netflix series about another serial killer, JeffreyDahmer. That show, Dahmer: Monster, is hard to watch, but Peters is astonishing in the role.

There are also similarities between the two cases. In each, people looked away when they should have looked long and hard.They covered their arses instead of doing what was right.

The Good Nurse is directed by Danish-film maker Tobias Lindholm (Oscar nominated for 2020 film Another Round) and writtenby Scottish writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns (Oscar nominated for Sam Mendes’s 2019 war film 1917).

That’s a talented film-making team but it’s behind the camera where this movie falls short. It touches too briefly on importantissues such as the stress on the health system, the poor pay and working conditions of its non-doctor employees and the impactthis has on vulnerable patients.

Amy has a heart condition but must keep working as she does not have health insurance. Charles has been under a cloud at hospitalafter hospital, yet he always finds another job because nurses are in short supply.

And the hospitals are businesses that do not want the police knocking at their boardroom doors. When the detectives, on theirfirst visit, ask the hospital’s head of risk management what happened, she replies, “There was an unexplainable incidencein which the patient expired.”

All of this is in the film but it should be front and centre. It’s the system that should be under the microscope, as theaged care one has been here. Instead what we have, in the main, is a story of two nurses who start out as friends but becomesomething else.

We know what Charles did but why he did it remains unclear. He is no “angel of death”. Generally, I don’t like too much characterback grounding, but there should be more in this movie. It might not definitively tell us why, but it would offer some ideas.