Time (2020)
There is a shot lodged in my head from Garrett Bradley's Time: a home video, slightly washed out, of small boys larking about in the way small boys do, and then the film cuts, and those same boys are teenagers, and then young men, and the years have simply vanished. No fanfare. Just time, doing what time does, indifferently and without mercy. That one gesture captures what this documentary is really about, and it is more devastating than any argument the film makes in words.
Bradley, whose short film Alone already circled the subject of women waiting while their partners serve prison sentences, builds Time largely from two decades of home video footage shot by Fox Rich across the years her husband Rob spent incarcerated in Louisiana. She shot compulsively, constantly, turning the camera on her sons and herself and whatever ordinary life looked like that particular week. The result is an archive of survival, and Bradley weaves it together into something patient and poetic, the whole thing rendered in a luminous black and white that lends it a kind of elegiac weight. As a piece of film-making, it is quietly remarkable. The assembly alone deserves serious credit.
But I think it needs to be watched with a clear head, because the film's framing tells only part of the story, and being honest about that feels important. It is marketed as the tale of a woman taking on an unjust system, and there is real truth in that. What it is less upfront about is this: Fox and Rob did rob a bank, at gunpoint. Nobody was physically hurt, but it was an armed robbery. They also attempted to tamper with the jury at Rob's trial, approaching two of its members. These are serious crimes, and any honest reckoning with the film has to hold them in view, not to dismiss Fox's story, but to understand it properly.
Fox took a plea deal and served three and a half years. Rob went to trial, lost, and, with the jury tampering counting heavily against him, was sentenced to sixty years. Sixty. Even accounting for the aggravating factors, that is a staggering number, and Fox reads it through the long shadow of Jim Crow and America's well-documented racial disparities in sentencing. That context is real. It is worth noting, in fairness, that brutal Louisiana sentences are not exclusively handed to Black defendants, but the racial disparities in how such cases are prosecuted and sentenced are extensively documented, and the film is not wrong to raise them.
Where Time is most persuasive, and most affecting, is in its quieter, less polemical argument: that this is a prison system built almost entirely around punishment, with little thought given to rehabilitation or reintegration. Because Rob, by every account presented here, was a model prisoner. He mentored fellow inmates. He stayed present for his sons through phone calls and visiting room glass. He did, in other words, exactly what we say we want people in prison to do. And the film asks, fairly and with genuine feeling, what a just society does with that.
Those home videos carry the emotional weight that the argument alone could not. The boys growing up in fast-forward, birthdays and school runs and adolescence flickering past while their father exists only at the end of a phone line, is quietly devastating. A sentence like Rob's does not only take years from the person serving it. It takes years from everyone who loves them, and Time is at its sharpest when it simply lets you feel that, without editorialising.
I would urge people to see it, but I would equally urge them to do a bit of reading around the case beforehand, or after. The film rewards the homework. It is not a simple story of innocence and injustice, and treating it as one would actually flatten what makes it interesting. The questions it raises about proportion, about what prison is for, about what we owe people who have genuinely tried to change, are worth sitting with. It reminded me a little of The Arbor in the way it uses unconventional form to get at a truth that a straightforward account might have made easier to dismiss.
Three and a half stars. Thoughtful, moving, and quietly complicated. Worth your time, and then some.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2026-08-29
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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