film roundup
Armageddon Time (Dir. James Gray). Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb, Anthony Hopkins. Deceptively gentle, writer-director James Gray’s cine-memoir fictionalizes a key period of his own life as a Queens-based, Jewish middleschooler in 1980, just before the election of Ronald Reagan. Banks Repeta plays Paul Graff, Gray’s talented and troublemaking onscreen surrogate, Jaylin Webb his comradein-arms, Johnny Davis, an African American youth who is treated with a much more pronounced and culturally engrained cruelty than the white Paul has or ever will be. The danger that this could become a guilty liberal apologia is mostly avoided due to Gray’s expertly grounding the tale in specificity of
place and time, while eschewing easy emotional outs. This is very pointedly about one child’s moral awakening—viewed through the prism of his friends and key members of his family (played by Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong and Anthony Hopkins)—and his dawning realization that he has very little power to change the pitiless nature of mankind. [R] HHHHH A Couple (Dir. Frederick Wiseman). Starring: Nathalie Boutefeu. A rare non-documentary from the great nonfiction filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, A Couple nonetheless draws on his verité instincts in how it contrasts a bucolic setting with a woman performing for an audience of one. Nathalie Boutefeu plays So-
Keith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, and ICON. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com. 22
ICON |
N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 2 | I C O N D V. C O M
KEITH UHLICH
phie, the long-suffering wife of the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. She recites passages from a litany of emotional letters that she wrote to her husband. Some are longing, some angry, some workaday. But all are shaped into an effective monologue that gives us a clear-cut sense of Sophie’s tempests of the heart. Working for the first time in widescreen with his usual cinematographer John Davey, Wiseman photographs Sophie as she wanders and/or stands sentinel in a variety of idyllic backdrops (shot on the French island of Belle-Île) that clash with her inner distress. This is, in many respects, a chronicle of a performance of the kind that the avant-gardists Jean-Maire Straub and Danièle Huillet specialized in, though its gently propulsive rhythms are pure Wiseman. [N/R] HHHH
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E
26
