With a title like Time, Garrett Bradley’s documentary (in theaters October 9, Amazon Prime on October 16) could be about anything. She’s being deliberately expansive because her subject—a woman, Fox Rich, raising her family and fighting for her husband’s release from prison—contains multitudes. Time is not a polemic about the injustices of the American carceral system, though that frustration and tragedy is in the film. It’s not a linear portrait of one woman’s resolve as she fights the system, though that spirit fills the film. Time, like time, can’t be reduced to one thing. It’s instead a collage of experience, lovingly assembled by Bradley with Rich’s invaluable help.
Much of the film, which lilts out over just 80 minutes, is footage that Rich shot herself over the course of twenty years. When she and her husband were in their 20s, they robbed a Shreveport, LA bank. Rich served some prison time, while her husband, Rob, was sentenced to an appalling 60 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The big life they had planned for themselves was not put on hold so much as it was horribly reshaped.
Rich filmed herself and her family as they tried their best to carry on, all while crusading for Rob’s release from such an overbearing sentence. Bradley then brought her own camera into Rich’s life, her lovely black and white footage blending with and supplementing Rich’s video diary.
What’s powerful about Time is what it suggests about the realities and ripple effects of incarceration. From a cruel judge’s perspective, Rob Rich’s life was simply cast into a permanent dark. with his loved ones as collateral damage. A problem citizen and his family tossed away to be forgotten. But of course their lives kept ticking along anyway. The lyrical, impressionistic structure of Bradley’s film gives weight and presence to that fact. Our draconian system grinds and destroys, but it doesn’t always obliterate. Here are Rich and her children and Rob to give testament to that, in the fluid swirl of Bradley’s film.
Rich became a kind of motivational speaker, telling people her story and helping them to see the value of hope and persistent determination in their own lives. Rich is angry at the mechanics that brought her to this place, but she has found a certain grace in her hardship—one that can be shared, like a kind of urgent blessing or encouragement, with her community and beyond. Rich is a fascinating figure; she’s got a gift for showmanship, knowing when to play up a moment caught on camera for maximal effect. Which isn’t to say that she’s putting on some kind of act. It’s rather that she is keenly attuned to the realities of America, particularly to how difficult it is to be heard by indifferent—or malignant—authority, especially for a Black woman dealing with a rigged and long biased justice system.
So Rich uses her charm and forceful way with words to make whatever noise she can. That boldness is interestingly offset by Time’s gentle, meandering aesthetic. There’s fire in the film, but even that is rendered delicately. The film feels intimate, but sometimes seems broadcast from a watery remove. I suppose that might simulate the liquidity of memory—yet it’s hard to get a firm understanding of the throughline of Rich’s story, and of particular developments in her and her sons’ lives. We see snippets of concrete things: a graduation, a reunion, some of Rich’s time working at a car dealership. But those fleeting scenes drift away and we float on, either forward or backward in time, to some other narrative ribbon.
In that way, Time is much more of an art film than its subject—so pertinent and political and steeped in exacting process—would seem to suggest. The beauty of the film is how it subverts that expectations for the viewer and for the system it ultimately targets. Rich refuses to be folded into a statistic, to be narrowed into an emblem of a particular outrage. Bradley is equally uninterested in doing that to her. The film is defiant in that way, demanding the audience look at the fullness of people who might otherwise be so marked, from the outside, by one experience, by a handful of decisions.
That’s what should scare and shatter us about Time. This is just one family’s story—yet look at how much complexity, how much roundness there still is to lives that have been so curtailed and thwarted. If it’s true of the Riches, it’s also true of so many others. One can imagine Time’s mosaic doubling and redoubling, growing in exponential bloom into something unfathomably vast, encompassing and swallowing the whole country.
To evoke all that staggering scale in under 90 minutes is no easy feat. Remarkably, Bradley’s film doesn’t telegraph its significance, doesn’t lecture—however righteously it would do so—about its importance. It’s not a demure film, by any measure, nor does it shy away from hard truths. What it does is allow the Riches the loveliness and grain of their individual being, and lets that be enough. The rest of the film’s mission, then, is what we in the audience do with what Bradley, and Rich, have graciously shown us. Time appeals to heart and mind. It also, hopefully, convinces us of their capacity for action.
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