5/5
Garrett Bradley’s Time is one of the most astonishing documentaries I’ve seen in the last year – a masterful use of the form. This film absolutely gutted me. The film follows Fox Rich, a woman struggling to raise her children and fight for the freedom her incarcerated husband, Robert. Bradley pairs footage that Rich filmed herself over the past twenty years with Bradley’s own contemporary footage, giving us a sense of the weight of time, of the lost time that this family has suffered due to Robert’s incarceration. We see the children – just entering kindergarten one moment, graduating from dental school or living as a sophomore in college the next – and we ’re made aware of the burden that families are made to bear due to the inequities in our criminal justice system. Bradley makes use of so many lovely poetic touches – from shots of the cardboard cutout of Robert that the family keeps with them, her framing of Fox and the rest of the family at key moments (especially at the end of the film), to her masterful use of archival material throughout the film. Bradley’s use structure is essential – she lets us know and come to care for the Rich family before we discover why Robert is in prison, building our empathy and forcing us to confront a broken justice system in a way that no narrative feature or standard documentary ever could. This is documentary filmmaking at its finest.
