On May 4, Beijing time, Bill Gates announced that he and his wife ended their 27-year marriage, after he posted on Weibo about the family documentary "Time" about his feelings.
Gates originally reads as follows:
A powerful statement of a family's ordeal and tenacity | Gates Notes
I've written about American Marriage and New Jim Crowe—and they did give me a deeper understanding of some of the difficulties facing black Americans. Now there's a movie called Time, which has a place like these two books. It was nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and I can tell why. I can't recommend it too much.
On the recommendation of a friend who was the film's executive producer, I watched Time at last year's Sundance Film Festival (before the COVID-19 pandemic forced events to pause). You can now watch it on Amazon Prime.
On the surface, Time is the story of a black mother with six children whose name is Sybil Fox Richardson, who is trying to rescue her husband, Robert, from louisiana state prison. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison for armed robbery. Most of the plot in the film takes place when he was imprisoned for nearly 18 years. Sybil (who was also known as Fox Ritchie) was involved in the robbery and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
The film is not about whether Robert and Sybil committed a crime. That's exactly what they did. The film partly tells the story of the impact of holding a father for 60 years on a family, and a lot about the tenacity of the family.
Many of the documentaries I've seen list all the facts in a clear storyline: this happens first, then that happens again. Time does not take this approach. Director Garrett Bradley is not interested in explaining every fact. You'll only learn a few details about the robbery and their respective trials, though there's a long passage in the film about Sybil telling the victims compensation.
Although Time doesn't tell you much, it shows you a lot. It is a poetic portrayal of a family that loves and supports each other despite its difficult circumstances. In one scene, one of the couple's sons graduates from dentistry. But instead of taking the time to explain what kind of degree he got or much else, the film depicts the joy of his accomplishments and how the family got together to celebrate. Details aren't as important as the way they cheer each other on.
The same treatment was used to describe how Sybil helped Robert and, more broadly, boldly protested mass incarceration. She has been repeatedly told that there is no new information about her husband's case. There are many long, painful scenes in the film about her waiting on the phone to communicate a judge's verdict with a chief. We don't always know exactly which verdict they are talking about, but again it doesn't matter. The point is how cold and inhumane the system is to everyone involved — including criminals and their families — and how much time and effort it takes to navigate the system. This idea is also important in American Marriage and The New Jim Crowe, but with this movie, you can see it directly.
Time is one of the least distant films I've ever seen. The events it records have an almost unbearable emotion. There's a scene at the end of the film that's different from what I've seen in documentaries before, and I don't want spoilers, so I can only say I can't believe what I was watching. It was shocking.