‘ Time’ takes look at toll of prison
Time is elastic. It can be a moment of joy, all too brief before it fades to memory, or it can stretch into a life of pain and waiting.
“Time” is also the title of director Garrett Bradley’s exquisite and moving documentary — winner of the best director honor at the Sundance Film Festival this year — that views time through the lens of a woman almost grown numb to all of its vagaries.
Sibil Fox Richardson ( Fox Rich for short) is a Louisiana woman who, along with her husband, Robert, made a bad decision in the late ’ 90s that would wreck both of their lives. With a failing business and mounting debt, they committed an armed bank robbery.
She received three years for her role as a getaway driver, but he didn’t just get the book thrown at him, he got the entire public library: 60 years.
While there was no doubt about their guilt, his punishment feels needlessly cruel, especially considering that Fox was raising six sons at home. ( Her mother, still bristling at what her daughter and soninlaw put her through, took care of them while she was imprisoned.)
This turned Fox into something of an accidental activist, campaigning against the state’s prisonindustrial complex and agitating for a commutation for Robert while also trying to keep her family together. But mostly she waits. Waits to hear from the judge. Waits for the lawyers to do what she’s paying them to do. Waits for calls that never come. Meanwhile, her sons grow into men — professional and respected men — waiting for their father to come home.
In the hands of a different filmmaker, Fox’s story might have become the usual grist for the documentary mill, with all the expected talking heads and pointed fingers.
Instead, Bradley has crafted a melancholic exercise in cinema verité — shot in lustrous blackandwhite and fashioned from 20 years’ worth of home video ( entrusted to Bradley by Fox at the very end of filming) and the director’s own footage — that makes its points about mass incarceration and the effect on the families left behind, especially the Black families, without raising its voice to a shout. It’s as much poem as protest, one scored by the downcast, bleakly beautiful piano music of Emahoy TseguéMaryam Guébrou, a reclusive Ethiopian nun whose work has been rediscovered in recent years.
It helps that Fox has a charismatic personality that betrays both pride and vulnerability and that her sons — two of whom are named Freedom and Justus — have a quiet grace.
One of the movie’s most striking scenes is when she gets up in front of her church congregation and requests forgiveness for her part in the crime that stole the love of her life from her and ripped a father away from his sons. Another is of her and Justus once again waiting — and waiting — on the phone for a judge’s decision.
Ultimately, “Time” is a family film, owing its strength to a mother who didn’t allow her sons to wander down the path to criminality while simultaneously becoming a crusader for a husband who can’t speak for himself.
Some might call it hard time, but she would probably just call it life.