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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Documentary ‘Time’ is a testament to loyalty, faith

Dan Webster

Above: Fox Rich is featured in Garrett Bradley's documentary film "Time." (Photo: Amazon Studios)

Movie review: "Time," a documentary directed by Garrett Bradley. Streaming on Amazon Prime. 

Sister Helen Prejean has had a lot to say over the years about crime and punishment, redemption and forgiveness. She shared many of her thoughts in her nonfiction book “Dead Man Walking,” which was the source of the 1995 movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

One of the most profound statements that Sister Helen shared was this: “(P)eople are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their lives.”

Sister Helen said that in reference to the men she counseled who had been condemned to death, an amalgamation of whom were personified by Penn in the Tim Robbins-directed movie. And she wasn’t referring to jaywalkers. She was talking about murderers, men such as Elmo Sonnier, who was convicted of murdering a young couple and who was executed in 1984.

I can only imagine what Sister Helen might say about the case of Fox and Rob Rich, the Louisiana couple at the center of Garrett Bradley’s documentary film “Time.”

“Time” opens with a montage of home videos, all focusing on Fox (the shortened name of Sibil Fox Richardson) as she documents her daily life with her growing family of sons (she would have six boys in all). Director Bradley plays with chronology, as she does throughout the whole movie, showing the boys as babies, then as young men, as toddlers and at a number of various other ages as they progress through school and seek out their own professions.

Bradley intermingles these videos with shots of Fox herself over the years, from when she was a young mother struggling to get by without husband Rob – more on that in a moment – to her present-day status as a business owner, an author, a motivational speaker and, most important, an advocate for justice in the nation’s prison system.

Louisiana’s prison system is certainly something she knows about from personal experience. It was in 1997, shortly after funding for the couple’s plan to open their own business fell through, that they – incredible as it may seem – decided to rob a bank. As Fox explains in the film, “What I remember more than anything was not wanting to fail, and we had become desperate. Desperate people do desperate things. It’s as simple as that.”

What followed, though, was not so simple. Though Fox would serve some two and a half years, Rob would – because of some problematic legal finagling and questionable attorney behavior – earn a sentence of 60 years. A non-commutable sentence, applied to a man without any prior convictions and for a crime in which no one experienced physical harm.

One criticism that can be made of Bradley’s film is that the reasons for Rob’s severe sentence are not fully examined or even explained, except for Fox’s professing that her husband was, at the time, certain that God would provide.

And maybe God did just that. If so, however, he did so through the tireless work of Fox herself, who emerged from prison to earn two college degrees from Grambling State University and, while working and raising her sons, never stopped trying to get her husband released, too.

When director Bradley first conceived of making “Time,” she saw it as a film short. But that changed when Fox delivered her the home-video recordings. Together with film editor Gabriel Rhodes, and with the help of workshops provided by the Sundance Institute, Bradley began to see the potential for a full-length feature.

And it was Rhodes who, taking the lead from Bradley, was inspired by watching their first cut in reverse order. “I went through all of  the archival footage we had, looking for shots that would play well backwards and give a sense of kinetic rhythm,” Rhodes told Filmmaker magazine. “The result hopefully is a sequence that feels as if time is unspooling in front of our eyes.”

That, then, is the artistic achievement of “Time.” Shot in black and white, with the years portrayed out of sequence, and with some scenes passing with little or no action occurring, the film ultimately has a – forgive me – timeless quality.

Which, of course, goes for the film’s main theme, too, that of the whole credibility of the national legal system being dependent on fair and reasonable criminal penalties. And this is especially true in how those penalties are levied in ways that clearly are tied to issues involving both race and class.

So maybe God, or however you perceive a higher entity, did intercede in the case of Fox and Rob Rich. I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to say.

Maybe we need to ask Sister Helen.