Producers: Anthony Katagas, Marc Butan, Rodrigo Teixeira   Director: James Gray   Screenplay: James Gray   Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins, Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb, Tovah Feldshuh, John Diehl, Andrew Polk, Ryan Sell, Jacob Mackinnon, Marcia Haufrecht, Domenick Lombardozzi, Dane West, Landon James Forlenza, Marcia Jean Kurtz, John Dinello, Richard Bekins, Teddy Coluca and Jessica Chastain   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: A

Coming-of-age stories ordinarily take an inspirational turn, and in semi-autobiographical ones nostalgia usually turns into sappiness.  Writer-director James Gray’s contribution to the genre avoids falling into that trap: it’s more troubling than uplifting, an emotionally complex story about Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), the writer-director’s surrogate, living in Queens in 1980.  Paul has a loving though fractious family, and as an eleven-year old sixth grader undergoes experiences that shake his confidence in his parents and teach him difficult truths about American society.  “Life isn’t fair,” his father tells him toward the close, which pretty much sums up the message Paul learns, realizing that no one played he superhero role he childishly dreamed of filling himself.  

Paul’s family includes his bullying older brother Ted (Ryan Sell) and their parents, Esther (Anne Hathaway), a home economics teacher who’s also president of his public school’s PTA, and Irving (Jeremy Strong), an engineer (and son of a plumber).  But their house is also a gathering place for his maternal grandparents Aaron Rabinowicz (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Mickey (Tovah Feldshuh), both retired schoolteachers, his Aunt Ruth (Marcia Haufrecht), a Holocaust survivor, and Uncle Louis (Teddy Coluca).  Their dinner-table conversations are raucous affairs where Aaron often plays sage mediator as bickering is the order of the day.

Aaron is also the only person who really understands and encourages Paul, who imagines becoming an artist while Irving expects him to get a useful paying occupation.  Paul lives in a sort of fantasy world, believing that his family is rich and that as head of the PTA Esther governs the school. The boy is also a jokester, who earns the ire of his teacher Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk) by drawing a caricature of him as a turkey.  A classmate, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), also disrupts the class, but Paul notices that Turkeltaub treats Johnny, the only black in the room, far more harshly. 

The two boys bond over their common outsider status, and Johnny, a poor but genial kid who lives with his increasingly confused grandmother, is repeating a grade and has dreams of his own (he has a collection of NASA patches and longs to join the space race), introduces Paul to the art of playing hooky—they run away from a class trip to the Guggenheim Museum (Paul paid for Johnny’s fee, and Johnny forged his grandmother’s name to the permission slip) to go to an arcade.  But when Johnny introduces his pal to marijuana, Irving goes ballistic—the scene in which he breaks down a door, removes his belt and thrashes his terrified son is pretty fierce.

The upshot is that after the public school principal (John Dinello) suggests that Paul might need remedial classes, his parents decide to transfer him, with Aaron’s help, to Forest Manor, the posh private school Ted already attends.  The shock is immediate: on his first day he’s accosted in the hall by a creepy man (John Diehl) who directs him to an assembly where the headmaster (Richard Bekins) introduces the guy as Fred Trump, a major benefactor; and the assembly is addressed by a special guest, Trump’s daughter Maryanne (Jessica Chastain), already an Assistant United States Attorney, who tells the students that success in life will be determined by hard work, ignoring the social and economic realities that already make them a privileged elite.

Paul is drawn into the life of the school, even making some friends among the students, but the rigorous attitude of the teachers leaves the dreamy kid anxious and uncertain.  But a wall has already arisen between him and Johnny, and when his old comrade approaches him from the other side of the fence that separates the recess area from the street, Paul ends the conversation quickly, and says nothing when his new classmates make racist remarks.  Aaron chastises him for his silence, and Paul decides to help Johnny, first by letting him stay in the clubhouse in his back yard when social services threaten to send him to foster care, and then by hatching a plot for them to steal a computer from Forest Manor, pawn it, and use the proceeds to run away.  Naturally the plan goes haywire, and it’s the aftermath involving a cop (Domenick Lombardozzi) that cements the realization Paul first felt in the initial classroom scene–that people are treated very differently by the system, depending on luck, on their circumstances, and on their race.              

The title of Gray’s cinematic memoir conflates two sources.  One is an interview Ronald Reagan gave to televangelist Pat Robertson, in which the candidate emphasized the potential for a nuclear cataclysm; the Graff family is shown watching a clip of it, with Irving dismissing the California governor as a shmuck before Paul hears his classmates at Forest Manor chanting his name approvingly.  The second reference is to reggae artist Wiili Williams’ song “Armagideon Time,” which is heard near the start and then fully, in The Clash’s version, at the close.  Its lyrics include the lines “A lot of people won’t get no supper tonight, A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight, The battle is gettin’ hotter In this iration, Armagideon time / A lot of people runnin’ and a hiding tonight, A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight, Remember to kick it over, No one will guide you, Armagideon time.”  Put them together, and the movie’s point is clear: looking back at his past, Gray’s concludes that the inequities in today’s United States, and the threat of destruction they pose, started with Reagan and have only metastasized over time.  So is his remorse for not having stood up against the pull of that “conservatism,” even as a kid.

That’s a pretty heavy message for a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movie, but Gray pulls it off without getting sanctimonious or maudlin.  The secret lies not just in the toughness of the message itself, but the layered fashion in which Gray dramatizes it.  The story is told from Paul’s perspective, but through the scrim of Gray’s own reimagining of it, and is marked more by magic realism than realism as such.  That also means that the characters are seen through the eyes of an awkward kid clumsily trying to make sense of what’s happening around him.  Thus in Hopkins’ hands Aaron emerges as a cultivated, sensitive man with a bearing that reflects his English upbringing and a nobility of spirit that allows for compromise when it’s called for, as well as a gleeful spirit that makes him Paul’s best buddy and confidante.  Without revealing too much, it’s safe to say that few will fail to be moved by his final scenes.  By contrast Mickey and Ruth are Eastern Europeans who carry with them the scars of their families’ mistreatment there, while Louis is a mostly silent schlub.

All of them, however, are secular Jews who espouse the conventional progressive views of the time, as noted in their attitude toward Reagan.  Yet they show themselves to be carelessly prejudiced, though embarrassed when they show such entrenched attitudes.  Esther and Irving are also prone to bouts of temper, especially when they’re disappointed in Paul’s obliviousness to the realities of their circumstances and his propensity to act out.  Hathaway and Strong, hardly the first actors one might expect to be playing these characters, prove to be inspired choices for the roles, capturing their complexity and imperfections superbly, with Irving’s admission of his fears and regrets at the close heartbreakingly real.

As for the youngsters, Webb is open-faced and gregarious as Johnny; given the boy’s turbulent life, one might be surprised at the portrait drawn of a generally happy kid, but this is, of course, Paul’s recollection of the friend whom, in the end, he turned away from.  Repeta, meanwhile, brings a tremulous quality to Paul that’s deeply affecting.  It reflects a child’s desperation at trying meet adult expectations and terrified of failing.  He also manages to pull off a few imaginary sequences, like that in which he dreams that one of his drawings is being applauded by an adoring crowd at the Guggenheim, introduced by the very docent (Marcia Jean Kurtz) who leads the class tour there.

With exceptional work from production designer Jack Fisk and costumer Heidi Bivens in capturing the period flavor (and the ambience of the Graff homestead and of the two very different schools), the film benefits from Diego Garcia’s cinematography, which ranges from luminous to darkly menacing as called for, and is often virtuosic—witness a scene in which Paul sets off a home-made rocket and, after jubilantly dancing over its launch, rushes to catch it parachuting down in the distance.   Robert Frazen and Lucian Johnston’s editing is similarly skilled, with some sequences—like Irving’s furious beating of Paul—shaped as brilliant montages.

Except for those who underplay its artistry in reaction to its political message, this will resonate as one of the most piercingly honest coming-of-age films in years.

Producers: Sam Mendes, Pippa Harris, Jayne-Ann Tenggren, Callum McDougall and Brian Oliver   Director: Sam Mendes   Screenplay: Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns   Cast: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Claire Duburcq, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Mays, Adrian Scarborough, Jamie Parker, Robert Maaser and Nabhan Rizwan   Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade:  A

World War I has served as the backdrop for some extraordinary films in the past—Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957) remains the most notable, but Peter Jackson’s remarkable documentary of last year, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” is another.  Sam Mendes’ “1917” now joins their ranks.  Like Jackson’s film, it’s a technical marvel, constructed by the director, cinematographer Roger Deakins and editor Lee Smith to appear to have been shot as a single continuous take—a far more stunning and convincing example of rare “simulated tracking” than Hitchcock’s “Rope”—admittedly an early experiment, constrained by the technology of the time—was. 

Of course, visual virtuosity is not enough to make a film great, or even worth watching.  Fortunately, “1917” has dramatic power to match its exceptional technique.

The fictional narrative constructed by Mendes and Kristy Wilson-Cairns, inspired by stories told to the director by his grandfather, a veteran of the war, concentrates on a single episode occurring on April 6, 1917, after the Battle of the Somme had ended, inconclusively, in late 1916.  The German high command decided to withdraw to more defensible positions, the so-called Hindenburg Line, but the British misread the move as a retreat, and planned an offensive to take advantage of what they presumed would be disorder in the German ranks as they withdrew.  Were the British advance to occur, the troops would fall into a trap and be massacred.

Last-minute recognition of the danger leads to a desperate mission:  two lance corporals, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Scofield (George MacKay), are assigned by the commanding general (Colin Firth, in a brief cameo) to cross into No Man’s Land and make their way through still-contested territory to the British front lines to deliver a message ordering a halt to the planned attack.  The urgency is accentuated by the fact that Blake’s older brother (Richard Madden) is among the officers leading the charge that could end in disaster.

From this point the film becomes an episodic account of their journey, the initially showing their rushed progress through the crowded trenches to the point where they can hoist themselves, gingerly, onto the battlefield, still uncertain about whether a withering blast of artillery might meet them.  They first cross the desolate No Man’s Land, presented in Dennis Gassner’s production design as a wasteland pockmarked by decaying corpses and shards of equipment, and then proceed through broader German trenches that have been abandoned, but where, as soon becomes apparent, dangers still lurk.

As Deakins’ camera prowls behind them, capturing their every move and occasionally showing the fear and concern on their faces, the two men continue into still-contested territory, where they periodically interact with others.  They happen upon a deserted farm, where they observe from a distance a dogfight that sends a German plane, billowing smoke, in their direction, and an encounter with its wounded pilot (Robert Maaser).  There follows a linking up with a bedraggled British brigade led by an officer (Mark Strong) who provides as much help as he can (and whose men offer their commiserations) before an episode in a half-destroyed town, where German soldiers have overlooked a young French woman (Claire Duburcq) hiding in a basement with an infant.

The mission continues into ever more dangerous terrain, until the presence of the British forces is disclosed by an unusual occurrence that might call to mind the very end of Kubrick’s masterpiece, signaling a brief return to civilization in the midst of the war’s brutality.  The message is finally delivered to the commanding officer (Benedict Cumberbatch, in another cameo), but the outcome is bittersweet at best. 

Throughout MacKay, with his long-faced determination, and Chapman, with his more boyishly ebullient personality, offer performances that are compellingly focused, and under Mendes’ direction the supporting cast, including the well-known cameo performers, contribute sharp turns.  Their efforts are complemented by the exceptional technical work.  Deakins’ camerawork, with its serpentine moves, takes pride of place, but Gassner’s production design, the costumes of Jacqueline Durran and David Crossman, and Smith’s smooth editing are no less impressive, while Thomas Newman bolsters the action with a supportive but not overbearing score.

A century on, World War I has recently received a slight revival of attention—through Jackson’s film, Saul Dibb’s fine, if somewhat workmanlike, 2018 remake of “Journey’s End,” and some excellent television documentaries.  “1917” represents a uniquely powerful take on the carnage of the Great War: while some might chide Mendes embrace of the one-take technique as gimmicky, it serves—like Peter Jackson’s remarkable restoration of archival footage—to provide a viscerally potent view of a conflict often relegated to the mists of history.