You may have noticed the rave reviews being thrown at Garrett Bradley’s “Time.” I say, don’t pay attention to them; it is very difficult to sympathize with any of the subjects in this documentary, aside from the children.
Fox Rich, “entrepreneur”, abolitionist, and mother of six boys has spent the last twenty or so years fighting for the release of her husband, Rob G. Rich, who is serving a 60-year sentence for a robbery they both committed in the early ‘90s. Bradley means to tell us that it was all done in a moment of desperation, but the best evidence that he comes up with is the Rich family’s intentions to open up a hip-hop store.
Bradley combines the video diaries that Fox recorded on cheap equipment these last twenty years, translated into black and white, with intimate glimpses of her present-day life. It’s a very personal statement, collaged by Bradley as she paints a portrait of Fox and Rob’s resilience over the latter’s imprisonment.
Of course, the idea of being relegated to a sentence of close to 60 years without having killed someone does feel unfair and can be attributed to the country’s rotten prison-industrial complex. Fox’s mother does imply his sentence would have been comparable to her daughter’s if Rob had just pleaded guilty. If he had good reasons for not pleading guilty, the film doesn’t explore it; it seems to have been a grave error, as he did commit a serious crime that all parties involved claim absolutely did happen.
Maybe he shouldn’t have robbed the bank, armed with a weapon, no less, in the first place. The reasons given aren’t very strong: “we were desperate,” Fox says at some point in the film and at another blames the whole thing on systematic racism, saying “you can't tell me if you do the crime, do the time, if you spend decades in the system.” How about just not committing the crime? Not just that, they committed armed robbery while having to take care of their children, ruining their lives in the process, and then, of course, playing victims.
Shooting her film in black and white, with assistance from DP’s Justin Zweifach and Zac Manuel, Bradley no doubt has stylish ambitions for her film, using non-linear editing and poetic interludes. This is supposed to be delivered as an artful statement on social injustice, but what if the injustice came from some truly boneheaded decisions on the parts of the “victims”? This is a film that feels rather shallow at its core. You’d be better off watching seminal and justified non-fiction works such as “13th” and “OJ: Made in America” than resort to Bradley’s apologetic rhetoric of the Rich family.