Mark Reviews Movies: TIME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 8, 2020

While driving, a woman turns her home video camera toward the empty passenger seat. At home, while recording one of her sons, the woman's camera lingers on an upholstered chair. These empty spaces should be filled. The woman says as much about the passenger seat, and we suspect the same goes for the chair inside the house. Was that her husband's favorite, usual spot?

Is that where he would be sitting, watching a happy, ordinary moment with his family? How many empty spaces have existed—in this house, in the car, in a house purchased later, at the business the couple wanted to open, at gatherings and parties, on vacations? How many moments, which should have been filled with extraordinarily ordinary happiness, have been ruined or missed, simply because of an empty seat?

We don't know. We can't calculate such things. One imagines Fox Rich, the wife, has thought about such things for almost 20 years. Has she done the math? Has she determined the variables? If every day would contain at least one such moment of joy, 20 times 365 is easy enough to calculate. How, though, does one assign a value to the births of three children—twins and another son years later—that Rich's husband has missed? With a 60-year prison sentence hanging over the husband's fate, how many more moments will be defined by that absence?

Concrete answers to such questions are impossible, so Time, Garrett Bradley's free-flowing documentary about Rich's fight to get her husband released from prison, instead focuses on the intangibles. The empty seats matter. The long and constant waits on hold, while on the phone with the clerk of a court, are seen repeatedly and sometimes in their entirety. Young children, who are playing or celebrating birthdays or offering naïve but sincere support for their mother, suddenly are grown, looking a lot more like the father they only briefly knew or have only seen in pictures—or as a life-sized cardboard cutout that Rich has one of her sons nail to the wall. It's something, at least, even if, compared to the actual presence of the husband and father, it's nothing at all.

Bradley easily could have assembled a more straightforward account of Rich's maneuvers, through her general activism for prison reform and her specific legal battles to have her husband's case re-sentenced, to get her husband Robert out of prison. After all, the filmmaker has seemingly complete access to her subjects—from Rich, to her children, to her mother, to the lawyer currently working on the case.

That approach might have been fascinating in its own right, but instead, Bradley observes, not the battle itself, but the toll that the long fight has taken on Rich and her sons. The worst of it, perhaps, is that the family members have done quite well for themselves in the two decades since the husband/father's incarceration, and that brings us to yet another unanswerable question: How much better could they have done and been with that man in their lives?

To explain Bradley's methods is both simple and difficult. Simply put, she intercuts home movies, recorded by Rich while both her husband and she were awaiting trial and sentencing for an armed robbery, with footage of the family during its latest campaign for Robert's release. The difficult part is in the way Bradley refuses to put forth a straightforward narrative.

We understand the essentials—the stakes of the legal fight, the basic legal strategy, the crawling pace of the legal system in arriving at an answer for or against Robert's freedom. The film's primary attention, though, is on what happened and what is happening between the actual judicial process. Between those two time periods, though, is an even larger, unseen one: the gap between then and now—as Rich goes from her own time in prison, after taking a plea deal, to becoming successful as salesperson and speaker, as the sons grow up and seem on the path to their own successes, as Robert sits in prison, only now realizing that a sapling planted when he first arrived has grown into a tree without him even noticing.

The juxtapositions between the past and the present are staggering, particularly in seeing the sons, who are innocent kids or just crying babies in one moment and young men or teenagers in the next (not to mention a sixth son, whose birth came after the initial home movies and who lingers in the room when his father is on the phone, just to hear his voice). One is talking to the camera as a boy in one moment, and in the next, he is graduating from college in a dentist's coat. Another young son does the same, and suddenly, he is in college, having graduated from high school two years early, participating in a political debate.

This is mainly Rich's story, and her change, from an uncertain and frightened young woman who doesn't know what will become of her family into a forceful and impassioned advocate for her husband and against the mass incarceration of African-Americans like him, is also inspiring. Bradley gives us that story—of Rich's speeches and trying to figure out what will happen to Robert during this round of the fight (Family members philosophize what time means to them, and Rich's thoughts, measuring every year as another attempt at Robert's release, are the most pragmatic).

The filmmaker mostly shows us how every moment, whether about the legal battle or just everyday life, is one of some degree of grief, hope, uncertainty, and/or anger about what has passed or might come to pass. Just as with the family, Time lives in and is defined by these moments.

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