Time is a crusade-against-the-legal-system documentary with a difference. Rather than following attempts to free an innocent victim from prison for a crime they didn’t commit, Garrett Bradley’s film follows Fox Rich’s years-long battle to get husband Rob released after he did hold up a bank and receive a 60-year sentence. Yet what Bradley, a non-fiction filmmaker and second unit director for Ava DuVernay, persuasively posits is that far from imprisonment making America a better, safer place, it actually has a negative effect, dividing families, crushing communities and perpetuating the systemic racism at the heart of the US legal system. Wherever you stand on the argument, Time offers poignant, humane food for thought.
Lensed in timeless black and white, Bradley combines poetic video-diary material captured over 20 years that sees the Rich children grow up without a father with contemporary footage of Fox trying to secure her husband’s release. So we see her reaching out to women in a similar position, calling the judge’s office on a daily basis for an update on the appeal for her husband’s release, and in a powerful moment standing up in front of her church to ask for forgiveness for her crime (the film fudges the detail but she served three-and-a-half years for the robbery after accepting a plea bargain).
Time is really about the resilience of long-lasting love.
But as much as it documents the work of a committed activist, Time also works as a portrait of a loving wife (after being teenage sweethearts, the strain of Fox only being able to see her husband twice a month is palpable) and a tenacious single mother raising her children (there is something moving about watching her children grow from kids horsing around in a swimming pool to well-adjusted young men in college and work).
Switching between a pure documentary approach and a more impressionistic sensibility, it does lack narrative urgency. But two things stand out: Bradley’s non-judgemental, probing approach to her subject matter and Rich’s stoicism as she waits to hear the result of the latest hearing. In many ways this is what Time is really about: the resilience of long-lasting love.