In 1997, two Black parents named Sibil and Robert Richardson attempted a bank robbery. It didn’t go their way. Sibil took a plea deal and served three and a half years in prison, during which time her five kids—including twins that were born between the crime and sentencing—were placed under care of family. Robert, on the other hand, refused the plea deal, and was sentenced to 60 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Time, the documentary on the Richardsons from director Garrett Bradley, doesn’t want you to pontificate on those years. It wants you to feel them.
The title Time is doing some heavy lifting. In one sense, it refers to Robert’s punishment: a lifetime of working for slave wages in an inhumane cage, also known as “doing time” in countries sick enough to downplay torture. It also refers to the two-decade period that the film covers, ranging from Sibil’s old home videos to more recent footage that Bradley gathered herself. It’s also a play on how Time plays with time. Far from a chronological telling of the Richardsons’ ordeal, Time jumps back and forth between the past and the present, filling the blanks of life unfilmed with beginnings and endings that speak to the experiences in between. The title is a layered denotation for a piece of cinema, but also a simple one. Why not name it something more suggestive of mass incarceration, the system that Sibil has set her heart on abolishing?
Simple: Time isn’t a message movie. It’s not about mass incarceration, or even the struggle to get Robert’s sentence commuted. It’s about Sibil Richardson and her sons, and they’re about the struggle to get Robert’s sentence commuted. That distinction is integral to the film. One can surmise that Bradley and her team were sympathetic to their subject’s beliefs—namely the abolition of America’s prison system—but the film takes care not to stake its purpose in an ideology, and it does so almost slyly. The non-chronological flow of Time severs its story from a clear sense of development, losing the finer details of the crime and the justice system’s response along the way. The black-and-white aesthetic, a discernibly artistic choice, dulls the assumption that the doc is here to inform, while a score of soft piano resists the temptation to dramatize or sensationalize. Altogether, Time looks and sounds more like an old Cassavetes film than a 21st century documentary. This frees the viewer from their typical expectations of a documentary, which in turn frees the film to find purpose not in ideology or message, but in people.
And with the spotlight on them, its people are felt deeply—especially Sibil, a driven and dynamic woman who shares herself without reservation. If anyone can take credit for aiming the film’s spotlight, it’s editor Gabriel Rhodes (whose most high-profile work can be seen in 2010’s The Tillman Story). Rhodes arranges hundreds of hours of footage across several years into a soapbox for Sibil, moving scenes from her life through time so that her past fears are lent credence by her future situation; or so her current words can be emboldened by the pain she survived twenty years ago, one scene ago. The only trick Time overuses is the cut between a younger Richardson and their older self: watching them age in the blink of an eye is a blow to the gut, at first, keeping the absence of Robert in mind, but that effect sometimes intrudes on the emotional anguish of time’s crawl. The natural poignancy of watching life unfold chronologically is a card Time waits to play until its finale.
It’s a film of human trial and human toll, shorn of bells or whistles that would dehumanize just by distraction. Its censure of the U.S. prison system is indirect, but paradoxically, the most direct approach possible—how broken are we, that we’d demand anything more than a glance at the system’s human cost before tearing it all down?
★★★★½ (4.5/5)
