“I feel like a champion,” says a defiant Fox Rich in a decades-old grainy home video. She has recently been released from prison. Her husband, Rob, is not so lucky: He has been sentenced to 60 years for a robbery the two committed together. She promises to wait for him.
Over the course of Time, a documentary following Rich’s 21-year wait to free her husband from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, her victor mentality never fades. But it does morph into something different as she navigates a bureaucratic justice system that can eat people up without mercy. She is hardened. “Success is the best revenge,” she says.
The audience watches as Rich’s kids grow up without a father. There are car rides, birthdays, a graduation, all the stuff of an everyday American life, but one in which something—someone—is missing. Rich asks for forgiveness from the women she robbed. She becomes an advocate for criminal justice reform. But this documentary reminds us that the time people lose while “doing time” can never be replaced or relived.
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