The documentary Time—which traces Fox Rich’s decades-long effort to get her husband, Rob, released early from a 60-year prison sentence for armed robbery—is both a testament and an indictment. A testament, to Rich’s single-minded sustenance of her marriage and family (the couple has four sons). And an indictment, of a criminal justice system that not only delivers punishment far outweighing the crime, but then doggedly does everything possible to obstruct an offender’s rehabilitation. Director Garrett Bradley weaves together footage from first-person videos Fox made over the years for her husband with gorgeously crisp, black-and-white sequences filmed in the present day. The conceit, as the title of the doc suggests, delivers a meditation on time that is stark and heartbreaking. The movie is delicately edited by Gabriel Rhodes, so that Fox’s mid-life face is frequently juxtaposed with her younger self. We also meet the couple’s twins as young men first, before cutting to a shot of them as little boys. It all emphasizes how time is at once moving too fast and too slow for the Rich family. A bit more context would have been nice—about the details of the case and Fox’s legal efforts; about the lives of her sons; about the role of religion in her life, which we see in snippets—but that’s not to say that the film, which sways along with the airy, ecstatic piano music of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun, ever feels slight. Time puts a face—and a family—to the systemic injustice within the American prison system, asking why it took an extraordinary woman’s extraordinary efforts to reclaim basic human rights.
