Time
Directed by Garrett Bradley
Running time: 1hr21 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Fox Rich and Rob Rich II in Time
Time is a film rooted in the humble art of the home video, woven and built upon and raised by Bradley to something like poetry: decades of a life, distilled and preserved, a record of presence for the absent.
The film's subject is also the one wielding the camera, in improvised selfie mode, through much of the footage. Fox Rich is a black Louisiana businesswoman and activist who has built a new life from the ground up since serving three years in prison at the turn of the century, for a botched bank robbery in which nobody was hurt. Her literal partner in crime, husband Rob, was sentenced instead to 60 years behind bars: Fox began the amateur video diaries that became Time as a record of the life he was cruelly missing, marking the growth of the sons they were supposed to raise together.
Yet Time isn't as linear as all that. Following a radiant, immediately heart-grabbing introductory montage of the past, beautifully spliced from the younger Fox's candid vignettes of everyday single motherhood, Bradley begins burning the temporal candle at both ends. We jump to the director's own footage of the older, more assured Fox, now a self-described prison abolitionist. The narrative we piece together as we dart across two decades of living is not just a procedural saga, though an insistent demand for judicial and penal reform quietly threads the years. It's also a dazzling, prismatic meditation on the nature of time itself, its elastic capacity to feel at once endless — all the more so when your lover is locked away — and blink-of-an-eye brief, not least in the process of raising a family.
Bradley shoots her contemporary footage in black-and-white to match Fox's scruffier video, blurring and shortening the gap between past and present the way our brains so often do. It's as profoundly moving as it is disorienting: a reflection on the life that grows and blooms even as we wait impatiently for years to pass.
TIME (2020) | Shot by Zac Manuel, Justin Zweifach and Nisa East | Edited by Gabriel Rhodes
Available to watch (free) on YouTube and Amazon Prime