Time (2020)
dir. Garrett Bradley
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2020 Amazon Studios
With her second feature film, director Garrett Bradley has earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary for Time, her searing portrait of struggle in the face of injustice. What makes her movie so effective is how personal it feels. Bradley didn’t have a prior connection to her subject, but her picture put me in mind of another Oscar nominated film, the extraordinary documentary from 2018, Minding the Gap. That movie’s director was the subject of his own film, and Bradley imbues Time with a similar sense of personal connection, despite telling someone else’s story.
In 81 brief minutes, we get to know Sibil Fox Richardson, who also goes by Fox Rich, and the hell that was her life for two decades. In 1997, when the small business that she and her husband, Rob, opened together ran into serious financial trouble, the two became desperate and committed the armed robbery of a bank. Fox served three and a half years for the crime. After a series of botched plea deals and his lawyer dropping out of the case when the Richardsons couldn’t pay him – none of which the film covers – Rob faced trial. He was sentenced to 60 years in Angola State Prison, without the possibility of parole.
Time doesn’t get into the minutia of the case. Rob’s nephew, for example, who is still serving his sentence at Angola, was an accomplice in the robbery, but the film never mentions him. We get the broad strokes of the crime and the circumstances that led to it. The real power of Time is in the title. Bradley intended to tell Fox’s story as a short-subject film, but after shooting wrapped, Fox handed over 100 hours of home-movie footage that she had shot as a way to document the life that her husband was missing. The couple have six children together, and Fox was pregnant with their twins when she began serving her own sentence.
Bradley weaves this amateur footage seamlessly into her chronicling of Fox fighting to secure her husband clemency from an unjust prison sentence. The effect is quite stunning. We see Fox both age and grow young again before our eyes. It gives us a sense of how much of Rob’s life has vanished while languishing in a prison cell.
Fox makes the case – both directly to the camera, and through her abolition advocacy work in the community – that director Ava DuVernay powerfully made in 13th, her own documentary about the American prison system; it’s a modern-day incarnation of slavery. How else to explain locking up someone with no prior criminal record for the rest of his life for stealing $5,000 and causing no bodily injuries? Our prison system is the mechanism we use to throw people away and forget about them, and an overwhelming majority of those people are people of color.
I’m not sure if Bradley stripped the color out of Fox’s home movies to match her own footage’s black-and-white cinematography, or if it was the other way around, but the aesthetic choice gives more poignancy to her main theme. Through the black-and-white footage, we feel every minute of the twenty years Fox Rich has fought to keep her family together and to free her husband.
The plaintive 1960s-era piano music recorded by Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou that Bradley uses for some of Time’s score adds a layer of reflective melancholy. It beautifully, and mournfully, accentuates the quieter moments of the film. We listen to the sound of a phone ringing as Fox makes call after call trying to get information on Rob’s pending clemency hearing. These small moments – which punctuate Fox’s voiceover contemplations about the injustice of our carceral system – build to the most powerful moment of the documentary. Fox explodes in rage after another failed attempt to find out the judge’s ruling. The clerk she calls every day has blown her off again. It’s nothing to the clerk, just another felon trying to get out. But Rob is a human being, and Fox doesn’t want anyone to forget that. The raw rage that Fox unleashes on the camera after she hangs up the phone gives us an inkling of what living with this struggle for so long has done to her.
We also see the toll that growing up without a father has taken on Fox and Rob’s children, particularly Freedom and Justus, the twins Fox carried while in custody. Both young men are thriving in their studies. Their reflections on growing up without their father in the house makes it abundantly clear that the justice system in America has no interest in rehabilitation or mercy; it is fixated on punishment and ripping families apart.
Fox Richardson resolved not to let the system do that to her family. The life-size cardboard cut-out of Rob that she keeps around the house is a powerful symbol of that resolve. She incorporates the prison phone calls – the exorbitant rates that prisons charge for those calls are never discussed in the movie, but they are another example of the cruelty of our carceral system – as well as her abolition work into the more quotidian events of her day. Her indomitable spirit is something to behold. Garrett Bradley collaborated with her subject. She used Fox’s own home movies and melded them into an exhilarating and ultimately hopeful portrait of someone fighting to make our world more just and centered on empathy.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Garrett Bradley must have been ecstatic when Fox Rich handed over those tapes. Using the footage to jump back and forth through time made what would have been a fairly straight forward story into an adventurous and engaging formal wonder.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- As much as I enjoyed Time, and this makes me feel petty to even mention it, but I had to fight through a lot of “God is great” talk. As someone who isn’t convinced by any evidence of the existence of a god, it was hard to hear at one point, “God watches over the sparrows.” If he does, why did he allow a man to rot in prison for 20 years needlessly?
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Time is available exclusively through Amazon Prime.