Directed by Garrett Bradley
Starring Fox Rich and family
Running time: 1 hour and 21 minutes
Unrated

by Audrey Callerstrom

Time is like a companion piece to 13th, Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary about the mass incarceration of people of color. Time focuses on Fox Richardson (who goes by Fox Rich and was  born Sibil Fox), a wife and mother to six children living in Louisiana. It opens with black and white home video of Fox, young and pregnant with twins. She’s only twenty-two weeks, but don’t forget, there’s two in there – she lifts her shirt to show her belly. She smiles and wrinkles her nose. “We’ll be OK,” she says. Who is she talking to? She’s talking to her husband, Robert Richardson. At the time, Robert was charged and awaiting sentencing for armed robbery.

A couple years ago, I attended a presentation by Emily Baxter, author of “We Are All Criminals.” As much as we see or hear of someone going to prison and think of them as an “other,” there are many of us who, at one time or another, have broken the law. Baxter’s book argues that while 1 in 4 have a criminal record, 4 in 4 have a criminal history. I kept this in mind while watching Time. Fox and Robert dreamed of opening a hip-hop themed clothing store in Shreveport, Louisiana. They leased a storefront. They designed a logo. This was going to be their family business. After a financer dropped out, Fox and Robert were desperate, so with some help from Robert’s nephew, and with Fox in the car, they robbed $5,000 from a credit union. No one was injured, and neither Fox nor Robert had any previous criminal history until that point. While Fox was able to get a plea deal, serving about three years, Robert was sentenced to 60 years in Angola, aka “The Farm”, aka Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States.

Time seamlessly weaves the home video footage with Fox’s current day-to-day, working, raising her children and advocating to get Robert out of prison. Director Garrett Bradley chose not only to film in black-and-white, but home video footage (shot on mini-DV tapes) was converted to black-and-white as well. This provides for smooth transitions between the two series of footage. Without it, grainy home video in color might have been distracting, taken us out of the moment. We might have looked for indicators of how old it was. “Oh, that looks like home video from _____.”  The music elevates an already strong subject. Original compositions were created for the film by Edwin Montgomery and Jamieson Shaw. The film also features the music of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun known for her piano compositions (check out her song “The Homeless Wanderer”).

You can tell how much Fox trusts Bradley. She lets Bradley in close, observing Fox when she applies makeup, irons her clothes, works out at the gym. Fox spends a lot of her time on hold, speaking kindly to the secretary to see if there are any updates from the judge. These phone calls are as second-nature to her as getting up and making coffee. Fox found out early on that putting all her trust in attorneys left her broke and feeling more helpless, so Fox advocates for Robert on her own. In one scene, Fox’s kind, personable demeanor flips at the drop of a hat; she’s tired of waiting on hold, of feeling like her husband’s case just gets lumped in with all the others. Fox keeps a cardboard cutout of Robert at home to remind her family that dad is here, even if he is there. The one thing that could have helped coax the audience along would have been title cards. Do we need our hand held? A little. We know who Fox is, and who Robert is, and we also know about Fox’s mother, who appears in two scenes but shares some of its most memorable lines. “(Prison) is almost like slavery; white man keep you there until he lets you get out.” But we don’t quite know, when we see footage of Fox’s grown children, which ones they are. I am comfortable with how time jumps, and could tell the difference between home video footage of Fox in 1999 versus footage of ~2017, but title cards showing certain dates or places would have been useful, even if used sparingly.

Although the Richardson brothers make statements in voiceover about time to lend more meaning to the title, what truly resonates here is that the time that Robert could have had with Fox and his sons is time won’t get back. He got to see his children grow, but in brief spurts, monitored by guards. He can talk to them about how their day was, but calls from prison are cut off mid-sentence. Just thinking of the last moments of this film I get that “about to cry” feeling that starts with a tingling cold sensation in your nose. Time is extremely well-crafted, timely, heartbreaking, and triumphant. 

Time is available to watch in select theaters Friday and on Amazon Prime beginning October 16th.