Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Time’ on Amazon Prime, An Against-The-Odds Love Story That Pushes Hard Against A Broken System 

Director Garrett Bradley’s award-winning documentary Time, now streaming on Amazon Prime, is an immersive, engrossing film that chronicles one woman’s unyielding quest to free her husband from a nightmarish prison sentence. Constructed in part of home video footage, Time drifts between the past and present to explore the powerful bonds of love, family, and determination.

TIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “At the beginning of every year, every New Year’s Eve for the past 20 years, we have always started the new year knowing that this was gonna be the year that my husband was coming home.” In one statement, Sibil Fox Richardson summarizes her decades-long struggle to free her husband Rob from a 60-year prison sentence for armed robbery, a stretch, she also tells us, “without probation, parole or suspension of sentence.” As Time unfolds, spooling and re-spooling as it does around the present and the past of its star and subject, Fox Rich, filmmaker Garrett Bradley’s documentary presents hard truths about the American criminal justice system, but also profiles the living and breathing everyday life of an American woman, wife, mother, and activist. Rich provided Bradley with hundreds of hours of home videos that she shot over the duration of her time both with and without her husband, and these lengths of tape — lengths of time — are fused together in a not-necessarily-linear manner to illustrate the inside and out of Rich’s world. There is intimacy here, and inspiration. Adversity, and seething frustration. At various points we wait with Rich as she is on hold with the court, interminably and in real time, often only to hear, once again, that there’s no news. There’s no information. Call another day. The system doesn’t care.

Time premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to universal acclaim, and garnered for Bradley the Directing Award for US documentaries. It gives us a powerful center in Rich, who is equal parts charming, determined, loving, and boldly herself. “I came from a people who had a strong desire to have something, to make something out of ourselves,” she tells us. The film also features her sons — they are rambunctious young boys in one shot, sturdy young men in the next; lives stitched together — and Remington gives us even more insight into the perception of time, and what drives Rich forward. “In our society, image is everything,” her oldest son Remington says. “My family has a very strong image, but hiding behind that is a lot of hurt.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Just Mercy, When They See Us, Crime + Punishment, 13th.

Performance Worth Watching: Sibil Fox Richardson is the heart and soul of Life. A montage later in the film of her lively, motivational oratory is particularly compelling.

Memorable Dialogue: “Posting live from experience.” While the phrase only forms part of a social media message Rich is filming to spread the word about an upcoming protest, it gets at what the entirety of Time truly does. This is a film that immerses us in one person’s continued ability to stay upright.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Time is a revelatory look at the nature of living in America, and how the systems and processes of that undergird our society are nameless and unforgiving. It also explodes that notion, and reveals through the strength of one individual how names — proper nouns — can remain unforgotten, remain in the light, remain on the lips and tongues of the people they love, despite the hand that the system dealt. The film benefits from the power of Fox Rich, but also from how it’s crafted, being of both personal footage and professional artistry. We are invited to live within it. Informing all of this and helping to bind it all together is Time‘s powerful soundtrack, which features the elliptical, enchanting piano compositions of Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Time reveals in its personal footage and profound storytelling a compelling story of one woman’s fight against an unforgiving system. It’s time well spent.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Time on Amazon Prime