One of the greatest American coming-of-age films is still George Lucas’s 1973 masterpiece American Graffiti. While mostly remembered for its nostalgic vison of American youth culture in the early 1960s, it contains a bittersweet subtext about the oncoming death of innocence and the end of the American Dream with events such as the assassination of John F Kennedy and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War being just around the corner. This subtext becomes the driving force in Armageddon Time, the new film by James Gray, set in Queens, New York City, right before the presidency of Ronald Reagan would begin and significantly alter political and cultural discourse in the USA in ways that still reverberate today. Through a coming-of-age narrative about 12-year-old Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) the film is driven by an uneasy momentum into a new vision of America where inequality and prejudice are increasingly ingrained, and opposition to them is increasingly failing.
CINEMA AUTOPSY 