TIME Review
Time waits for no man. It’s a phrase with weight that you’ve heard before but a phrase is always just that: an ungraspable idea that floats through the air. In Garrett Bradley’s wrenching TIME, this ungraspable idea, an unstoppable force that carries memories and delivers death is explored through a piercing human viewpoint. For the family at the center of this documentary, the African American Rich’s, time is a lost friend and a sworn enemy in equal measure and worse yet, an unseen accomplice to the malicious process of justice in America.
When the future Mrs. Rich, Sibil a.k.a. Fox, meets Rob, the sparks are instantaneous; they soon fall in love and from that love children will arrive. Their love for one another is strong, but the forces of oppression and inequality, sadly, are stronger and less forgiving. The young couple soon face dire straits as most young, Black couples like themselves face in the state of Louisiana and a desperate decision to commit robbery lands both of them in prison, lives that once held promise now sentenced to a stationary hell. Fox herself manages to get out early while Rob receives a 60-year sentence, leaving behind a wife that will desperately hold onto their love and grow into a determined, older activist and entrepreneur with six children (all of them boys) who will grow, cry, love, and learn without their father.
The behind-the-scenes machinations — Fox’s continued attempt to get her husband out of prison, her run-ins with a slow as molasses justice system that throws every wrench available into her plans — seem to be of less concern to Bradley’s document. Instead, what the director finds deepening material in is the hundreds of hours of home footage that Fox recorded as a sort of capsule for a husband she knew she would see once more. The images, like memories, ebb and flow throughout the current predicament faced by Fox and her family as they try to get Rob out of prison. Shot in stark black and white, the images of children and their steely single mother meld together in a plane of existence where the past and present mingle among each other with an uncertain future just out of frame. Fox and Rob’s children purr as infants, babble as toddlers, screech as elementary tots and eventually become young, seemingly upstanding young men destined for futures that their own parents once dreamed of when they were young lovers. The contrasts between the personal interludes of seeing a family grow and that of Fox’s increasingly hindered battle with courts make TIME feel like more of an uncovered memento rather than a straight to the facts documentary. Indeed, elements regarding Rob and the inner machinations of the system that has snared him remain as elusive as they do to Fox herself, intentionally so perhaps. For Bradley, and for maybe even Mrs. Rich, the system and its strange and cruel workings matter little when compared with the impact a father’s absence has on a family.
What Bradley instead dives into is a particular portrait of a shattered family that underlies the larger socio-economic issues at play within the lives of many people, especially those of color, in America. In the face of a prison system that destroys rather than rehabilitates; a court system that halts rather than allows justice to flow freely; and the inequality that puts many on the path to damnation, Fox Rich persists. As the anchor and at times, narrator, of the Rich family story, Fox makes for an inspiring and always captivating subject to base the film around. In her evolution from a “widow” facing an uncertain future toward a future that reveals a strong, intelligent woman steadily facing down the forces holding the love of her life, TIME breaks through its monochromatic visuals to put a vivid face to the casualties of oppression. As with other documentaries that follow similar topics, there are quiet sequences of defeat where somber resignation regarding Rob’s potential fate creeps across Fox’s and her children’s faces even as they express quotes of hope and reunion; but there are also those rare moments of victory that Bradley efficiently builds to, letting her subjects’ emotions roar with unmitigated joy.
Where TIME mitigates its hard hitting journalistic edge, it makes up for in bringing to the forefront the humans that get buried in the statistics of such works. For the Rich family, their story is one that sadly plays the same notes many other families have become accustomed to. In these current times, the tyranny of the prison industrial complex and even time itself will press on, unbothered by the victims they create, but for one moment, for one family, perseverance and the bastion of love will prove the victors. Where time can put away the past and present in equal measure, the inevitable wave of the future will always arrive, and with it, hope.
3.5/5
