Numerous films and shows have focused on innocent African Americans unjustly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, including such recent offerings as Ava DuVernay’s mini-series When They See Us, on the wrongfully convicted Central Park Five, and Just Mercy, a dramatization of Bryan Stevenson’s eponymous book starring Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson.
Time, a new documentary by Garrett Bradley, adds to this roster by zooming in on a story of overzealous prosecution.
The eighty-one-minute production features, as did a recent article in The Progressive, the husband and wife Rob and Fox Rich. Both readily admit to participating in a 1997 armed bank robbery with a third accomplice, for which they were found guilty. Fox, who acted as a getaway driver, accepted a plea deal and served three and a half years behind bars. Rob, a first-time offender, was sentenced to sixty years in prison for a crime, he notes, that “no one received medical treatment for.”
Rob was sentenced to hard time at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, that notorious maximum security prison farm known as “Angola,” visually established in the film through forbidding aerial long shots.
Fox, the film’s protagonist, relentlessly campaigns for decades to free Rob. She raises the couple’s six children, lobbies various coldhearted courthouse bureaucrats, accepts collect calls from Rob, attends and speaks at churches, travels to Angola on visiting days, repents for their crimes, and relentlessly crusades to reunite the family.
“Our prison system is slavery,” she says. “I consider myself to be an abolitionist.”
Time, which won the best director award for Bradley, a young African American woman, in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, incorporates original as well as an extensive video trove of MiniDV tapes lensed by Fox herself. Mixing the footage, the film goes back and forth from the present to the past tense to create a poetic, lyrical ambiance.
As arty as it is in style, Time is sketchy when it comes to various factual details, such as the couple’s motives for committing their armed robbery and the crime itself. Fox says “desperate people do desperate things,” but the only specific reason given in Time for robbing the bank is that the couple wanted money to open Shreveport’s first hip-hop clothing store.
This sole explanation may make it difficult for some viewers to empathize with the bank robbers. Lamenting that “I saw the rippling effects for the choice I made,” Fox apologizes for the armed stickup she and Rob carried out and for its “effect on all the women in the bank.” But those female tellers and customers aren’t given the opportunity by the filmmaker to express their own reactions to the crime.
Yet the couple’s contrition is as clear as the film’s core message: What good does it do to keep Rob, who has paid his debt to society, locked up for another forty years—at great expense, by the way, to taxpayers? Who benefits from denying Rob’s waiting, loving family a father and husband?
Has Rob—and his sons and wife—earned the right to a second chance, or must they be punished in perpetuity? Rob’s fate is a plot spoiler this reviewer won’t reveal; to find out what happens, don’t miss this poignant picture. As our racial reckoning unfolds amid the Black Lives Matter and anti-mass incarceration movements, Time is a timely tale of hope, perseverance, and justice.
Time opens in select theaters October 9, 2020, and worldwide on Amazon Prime Video October 23.