TIME – A Review by Hollywood Hernandez
We’ve seen a number of documentaries lately where a person is wrongly jailed and seeking their release, but it’s hard to gather sympathy for a man who is incarcerated for a crime that he actually committed. However, that’s what director Garrett Bradley does in the Amazon Prime Video movie Time. The movie tells the story of a black couple who freely admit to robbing a bank. Sibil Fox Richardson spent three years in prison for her crime, but her husband, who was the mastermind of the crime, received 60 years in prison with no hopes of parole or early release.
Time tells the story of the 20 years Mrs. Richardson raised a family on her own while fighting for the early release of her husband. The film consists mainly of over 100 hours of home movies made by Mrs. Richardson of her daily struggles raising a daughter and three sons who have no memory of their father. She was pregnant with one of the boys when her husband was sent to jail, so she has one child who has never even met her father.
This is a movie story about one family’s struggle, but it could easily be the story of thousands of families who are suffering with the same situation. There’s a quote in the movie from Sibil’s mother that could easily be the bottom line to this story, “It’s easy for a black man to get into jail, but it sure is hard for him to get out.”
The movie has a run time under one hour and it is not rated. Time won the director’s award at The Sundance Film Festival and on my “Hollywood Popcorn Scale” I rate it a JUMBO.