Time (2020)

Available on Amazon Prime

Produced and directed by Garrett Bradley

Featuring Sibil Fox Richardson and Robert Richardson

Time, an Academy Award-nominated documentary, is the story of Sibil Fox Richardson (aka Fox Rich), mother of six, pursuing the early release of her husband, Rob, serving a 60-year prison sentence in Louisiana.

It isn’t particularly clever. It wasn’t beautifully shot. And it doesn’t even have a compelling message. I can’t say it changed me, but it did remind me of some things I’ve come to believe about the world.

Time is ostensibly about what’s wrong with America’s prison system. That’s what Fox Rich said on camera. I agree that our carceral system is seriously flawed, but that wasn’t the message I got from this film.

Time is about familial love. It’s the story of one person’s intelligent, resourceful, and amazingly persistent efforts to raise six promising children during the 18 years that their father was absent.

For several years when K and I were starting out in our marriage, I had the opportunity to have an inside view of an extended African-American family that lived near us in Washington, DC. And one of things I was most impressed by during that time (and since, in other situations) was the role that African-American women play in their culture. It is, IMHO, a much larger role than White women play.

Not only do they take care of all the quotidian needs, and the emotional needs, and spin the thread that holds the social fabric of the family together, they also in many cases bring in all or most of the family’s income. And this was especially true for my and my parents’ generations.

I read somewhere that Garrett Bradley had intended to make this a short film. But when shooting wrapped, Fox Rich gave him a bag of tapes containing some 100 hours of home videos that she had recorded over the previous 18 years… and he turned it into a feature.

It is those bits and pieces of amateur B-roll clips that give the 80-minute documentary its depth and reality. (Accomplished with a pitch-perfect musical score and amazing editing.)

If you are looking for a movie to further the argument about the problems with prisons in the US, Time won’t meet your expectations. But if you want to be inspired by the role that Black women play in Black America, or you want to be inspired by the story of one amazing person, Time will satisfy.

Critical Reviews 

* “This is a beautifully shot film that’s as interested in studying the changing faces of its subjects as laying out their struggle from end to end.” (AV Club)

* “Time, Bradley asks us to remember, is what we lose. Only in a movie can we entertain and engineer the fantasy of getting it back, rewinding the clock, restoring presence to a loved one’s absence. Thank God, then, for movies. This one especially.” (Rolling Stone)

* “[Time] tells a story as urgent and beautifully human as almost anything on screen this year.” (Entertainment Weekly)

You can watch the trailer here.