‘Time’ a terrific look at pull of loss

A story about an unjust system

There is a scene in the documentary “Time” that captures a woman on the phone trying to speak to a judge’s clerk. She’s put on hold. Nothing happens as the seconds tick away. One minute becomes two. The woman is still, waiting patiently. Eventually, she gets through but the call comes to nothing.

Most filmmakers would leave that tedious moment on the cutting room floor, but not director Garrett Bradley, who is making her first nonfiction feature. Her film is precisely about wasted time. “Time” is a story about loss and patience and an unjust system that demands both.

The woman on the phone is Sibil Fox Richardson and she’s trying to get her husband released from prison while also raising six boys. “Time” is her story, augmented by video diary entries she made for her husband, locked up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Bradley weaves these incredibly intimate videos with her own footage of Richardson and her family, always unrushed. A young son is seen sleeping or putting on socks. The slow pan out from a grandmother’s face. A son simply eating. People chatting before an event. All while a lazy piano plays.

“Time” had its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where Bradley was awarded best director for US documentary, becoming the first Black woman to win that prize. “Time” deserves every award it gets: It is terrific filmmaking, augmented by the woman at its center, a formidable and charismatic figure.

Richardson and her husband, Robert, both spent time for the attempted armed robbery of a credit union to help keep their urban clothes store afloat. No money was stolen and the culprits were all first-time offenders. She served three years; her husband got a 60-year sentence in 1999.

This black and white film is not about guilt or innocence. It’s about the cost one family has had to bear. Richardson was pregnant with twins when their father was locked up; the film captures them on the cusp of turning 18. “They have no idea what fathers even do,” she says.

The filmmakers go back and forth in time, juxtaposing images of 20 years ago with recent footage. Toddlers become men, men go back to kindergartners. There is always something missing — a husband and a father.

“Time is when you look at pictures of when your babies were small. And then you look at them and you see that they have mustaches and beards,” Richardson says. “And that the biggest hope that you have was that before they turned into men, that they would have a chance to be with their father.”

The personal gets political as Richardson argues that the national prison system is just a modern form of slavery. “Listen, my story is the story of over 2 million people in the United States of America,” she says. She becomes an advocate and a dynamite public speaker. But above all, there is love, an unwavering, fierce love for a man she can only visit twice a month.

Among the interesting things about Bradley’s approach is the film’s color palette. She has chosen to strip the home movies of color and present her own modern footage in the same monochrome, giving the different parts of the film a knitted smoothness and timelessness, a wheel that keeps spinning.

The last few moments contain some of the most exhilarating and moving moments ever committed to film and Bradley’s reversing of video images — ending with a kiss — is simply gorgeous, poetic filmmaking. “Time” is very much worth everyone’s time.

“Time,” an Amazon Studios release, is rated PG-13 for language and adult situations. Running time: 81 minutes. Four stars out of four.

❑ Footage ❑ ❑

The new sci-fi rom-com “Save Yourselves!” is rich in comic timing, but seemingly nowhere more than in its very title, coming in this of all weeks. Unless, of course, you enjoyed the presidential debate.

But there are several layers of meaning to the title, even without that exquisite yet unintentional one. The first concerns the fact that killer aliens descend to Earth, bent on destroying all in their path. So there’s that.

The other concerns the relationship at the core of the movie, that of a Brooklyn hipster couple trying to cope with various needs and differences and working on growing and nurturing their love, much like the yeast starter for their homemade sourdough.

There are many Brooklyn millennial references like that, and luckily most of them hit their mark with a delightful zing, thanks to a crackling script by directorswriters Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, but especially because of the easy chemistry between the terrific leads, Sunita Mani and a hilarious John Reynolds. The plot does get rather confused and trippy in the latter third, but by then we’re so charmed by this couple and their creative efforts to save themselves that honestly, it hardly matters.

We begin in the year ... well, “the year humankind lost Planet Earth.” So from the start, we sort of know where this is going.

But before the aliens arrive, in the form of cute little furry “pouffes” that resemble comfy footstools, we get to know Su and Jack. Fittingly when we meet them, she’s on her laptop and he’s on his phone. Technology clearly rules their lives. Typical domestic dialogue: “Alexa, play!” “Alexa, stop!”

Su is miffed, because Jack messed with her tabs on her laptop, and now she can’t find her stuff, only Jack’s articles on baking bread. She asks for an apology. He obliges. “What are you apologizing FOR?” she asks, as if to a child. “That thing you want me to apologize for,” he says. You can tell they go down this road all day long.

But the couple is working on bettering themselves, and one evening at a party, they meet a friend who owns a remote cabin upstate. They take him up on his offer of a week away from it all. They decide to cut off all technology, and won’t communicate with anyone. They settle in for a week of hiking and canoeing and making lists like “How to Be a Better ‘We.’”

And then, as if cutting off iPhones and iPads for a week weren’t scary enough, there’s that alien invasion thing.

But hey, these are tough times. A diversion like “Save Yourselves!” might just save your week.

“Save Yourselves!”, a Bleecker Street Films release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America, “for language.” Running time: 93 minutes. Three stars out of four. (AP)