Film review

  • Time

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Garrett Bradley (2020)

    Sibil Fox met Rob Richardson, her future husband, when both were in high school.  In 1997, they married and moved ahead with plans to open a hip-hop clothing store in Shreveport, Louisiana.  When their investors pulled out the couple in desperation decided to rob a bank, with the help of Rob’s nephew.  They were caught and charged.  Sibil pleaded guilty, was sentenced to twelve years in prison and was released after serving three and a half.  Rob was tried and sentenced to sixty years’ imprisonment, without parole.   After she came out of prison in 2002, Sibil dedicated herself to raising her children, all boys, and to fighting for her husband’s release.  She also began to videotape family life in the hope that Rob might, one day, be able to partake of these family memories.  She first came into contact with the documentarian Garrett Bradley in 2016, in connection with a short film the latter was making.  When Sibil lent her the collection of tapes she’d made over the years, Bradley embarked on a documentary feature about the Richardsons’ lives and struggle.  Time is the result.

    Fox Rich, as Sibil now calls herself, has campaigned not just on behalf of her husband but for penal reform more largely.  As African Americans, she and Rob have been on the receiving end of an iniquitous prison system that was also the subject of another recent documentary, Ava DuVernay’s 13th  (2016).  Garrett Bradley combines footage from Fox’s home videos with descriptions of her continuing work as an advocate and motivational speaker.  (Both parts are in black and white.)  The film’s genesis and content, and the woman at its centre, are remarkable yet Time, almost universally praised by critics, is exasperating.  What sort of a documentary is it that, after you’ve watched, necessitates an online search for the key facts of the matter?   The information above about Fox’s plea bargain and Rob’s case going to trial, for example, comes from the internet, not the film.

    Dramas based on real-life events sometimes make you think they’d have been more honest and instructive as documentaries (albeit they’d also be seen by fewer people that way).  The non-fiction components of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology were a recent instance of this.  Time, more unusually, is technically a documentary but operates somewhat like a fictional drama.  Fox’s home videos function as flashbacks.  The narrative progresses towards the heroine’s eventual, against-the-odds triumph.  You’re more conscious of this because the factual context and details are skimpy.  Bradley hasn’t made a long film (eighty minutes) but, once you realise she’s not going to be more informative, the main point of spending time on Time is looking forward to the happy ending you’d expect in a fictional piece.

    A drama worth the name, however, would explore its protagonist much more thoroughly than Time explores Fox Rich – might, say, consider the degree of conflict between her fight for justice and her domestic role.  We see Fox’s elder sons involved in the campaign for Rob’s release but there’s no indication of whether their mother’s public appearances have increased only in recent years, as her six children have got older – and not a whisper of tension within the household about the demands of Fox’s activism.  How come she gave birth to her younger sons during her husband’s years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary?  We wouldn’t necessarily think less of Fox’s wifely devotion because she hasn’t lived like a nun the past two decades but Garrett Bradley simply ignores the issue.  The miscarriage of justice in this case consists not in the wrongful conviction of an innocent person but in the outrageously disproportionate length of their prison sentence.  There’s a sequence in which Fox is publicly contrite, in front of the pastor and congregation of the church she attends, about the offence she committed alongside Rob.  (She drove the getaway car from the scene of the crime – another fact gleaned online.)  Yet we get no sense of how they made their decision to carry out armed robbery – who was the prime mover? – or what Fox feels about the length of her husband’s sentence relative to hers.

    The reason for Time’s reticence on these potentially complicating elements is clear enough.  Garrett Bradley’s film has plenty of artful touches.  The narrative’s movement between past and present helps point up different aspects of its one-word title.  Rob is doing time.  Fox’s videos reflect how much time is passing.  As a visual record, they redeem that time.  Bradley’s main purpose, though, is to endorse as well as observe Fox’s campaign.  Instead of the abundant statistics of the much superior 13th, Time supplies a string of assertions by its impassioned protagonist.  She describes the American prison system as, for example, a ‘personal vendetta’ on the part of ‘the white man [who] keeps you there until he figures it’s time for you to get out’.  It’s possible to accept the essential truth of Fox’s arguments while still feeling a resistance to her extravagant rhetoric – which Bradley does nothing to interrogate.  For me, her documentary is the latest addition to a quickly growing list of films, factual and fictional, that are feted not because they’re coherent, convincing cinema but because their political point of view is compelling.

    When Fox Rich talks about crime being a consequence of socio-economic conditions, you may find yourself asking whether this is meant to explain her and Rob’s felony – whether loss of funding for a business venture is ‘poverty’ in the generally understood sense of the word?   You may even dare to wonder if her criminal record doesn’t slightly compromise Fox’s moral authority.  But you’ll also wonder at her fortitude and how anyone in her circumstances could succeed in bringing up a family, holding down a job and fighting a cause at the same time.  Besides, Fox is well prepared to disarm criticism.  As she tells an audience on a lecture tour, it’s only to someone who’s faced the kind of adversity she’s faced that she’s prepared to concede the argument, ‘You do the crime, you do the time’.

    Another respect in which Time resembles a Hollywood dramatisation of a battle for justice is that its leading lady is highly photogenic.  She’s also highly aware of the camera.  Both qualities come through in sequences showing her repeated phone calls for news on Rob’s latest attempt to be considered for parole, throughout which Garrett Bradley holds Fox’s face in close-up.  Her sons – especially the eldest boys, twins she was carrying at the time of the bank robbery – are more quietly charismatic (and a credit to their mother).  Rob, for obvious reasons, isn’t much in evidence until his eventual release from jail.  He was granted clemency in September 2018.  Wearing a T-shirt proclaiming ‘Never Give Up’, he’s barely through the front door of the family home before he seems to be preparing to follow his wife into a career as a motivational speaker.

    Early on in the narrative, Fox Rich affirms her belief in the American Dream.  Its enduring appeal, even for people like her caught up in American Nightmare, is quite something.  One of Time’s most striking features is how strongly it promotes Fox’s individual as well as moral enterprise. (Conjecture, of course, but perhaps that was part of the deal she struck with Garrett Bradley when supplying her home videos?)  A recent article by Kriti Merotra on the website www.thecinemaholic.com  reinforces the film’s celebration of Fox as a mover and shaker – to comical effect.  Merotra’s article starts off sounding like a review but ends up as PR for Fox and her husband:

    ‘With degrees in Bachelor of Science and Master’s in Public Administration from Gambling State University, Fox is well qualified to do what she is doing. Her first-hand experience of seeing how families suffer from the hardships associated with crime and punishment also plays a massive role in her way of working.  Fox and Rob, now public figures, also have a merchandise line, which you can find on their website.’

    7 January 2021

  • County Lines

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Henry Blake (2019)

    Born in New Zealand and now based in London, Henry Blake is a youth worker turned film-maker.  County Lines, which he wrote as well as directed, is his first feature.  (He made a short, with the same title and subject, two years previously.)  At the end of the film, Blake puts on the screen the dismaying statistic that up to 10,000 children as young as 11 are now involved across the UK in ‘county lines’ operations, which Wikipedia summarises as ‘trafficking drugs into rural areas and smaller towns, away from major cities’.  Blake tells the story of one such youngster, fourteen-year-old Tyler (Conrad Khan).

    Tyler lives in London with his single mother Toni (Ashley Madekwe) and younger sister Aliyah (Tabitha Milne-Price).  The family is badly off; with Toni working night shifts as an office cleaner, Tyler is responsible for picking up Aliyah from school, preparing their food when they get home, and so on.  Excluded from regular school himself, he attends a pupil referral unit (PRU), where he stands out as difficult and disengaged.  As two of the staff (Anthony Adjekum and Chizzy Akudolu) explain to Tyler’s angrily defensive mother, the boy spends much of his time either in fights or staring into space.  Traffickers see PRUs as fertile territory for recruiting vulnerable youngsters to county lines work but Tyler doesn’t become involved through a simple pick-up.  On his way home one afternoon, he calls into a fast-food place and buys chips, which other teenage boys immediately try to relieve him of.  A man in his twenties, getting up from the table where he’s been sitting alone, intervenes.  The would-be chip muggers scarper.

    The young man is Simon (Harris Dickinson), a drugs dealer.  It’s an effective touch having him do Tyler a good turn on their first meeting – and having Tyler, grateful as he is for Simon’s chivalry, politely decline the offer of a lift home.  Simon is the prime example of Henry Blake’s determination, in setting County Lines in motion, to resist being judgmental towards his characters.  Quite why and how Tyler pursues contact with Simon is less persuasively handled.  The next time Tyler sees him, Simon is beating up a teenager in an alley near the football pitch where Tyler has just been talking to a boy on the team he used to play with.  One day, as Tyler sets out for the PRU, he sees a car parked in the street.  He approaches it from behind and initiates conversation with the man in the driver’s seat.  Simon doesn’t immediately recognise Tyler; I didn’t understand how Tyler recognised the vehicle.

    This time, the boy doesn’t manage to say no to a lift.  As Simon takes a call in the car, Tyler gazes admiringly at his expensive wristwatch.  They go to a café and he listens respectfully as Simon, describing himself as an ‘entrepreneur’, stresses the importance of looking after your family when you’re the man of the house.  He also asks about and listens to Tyler – an unaccustomed experience that the boy welcomes.  Within a few hours Tyler, courtesy of Simon, has a new pair of trainers and a new way of spending his days.  At the end of this one, he’s sufficiently distracted to forget to collect Aliyah from school.

    While Blake doesn’t baldly censure the people in his story, he makes clear the consequences of their actions.  One night, Toni brings home a man she’s been out with.  In the kids’ bedroom, Tyler can’t avoid hearing drunken laughter, then the pair having sex.  Next day, Toni struggles into work the worse for wear, falls asleep and gets fired – that reinforces Tyler’s determination, inspired by what Simon said, to provide for his womenfolk.  This is a good way of tautening the plot but Blake over-stresses it.  He makes Toni’s fecklessness too much responsible for Tyler’s move into county lines – an emphasis which overshadows the fact that his situation and behaviour meant he was already ripe for the picking.

    The seductive surface of Simon’s lifestyle is quickly extinguished by the grim reality of the world Tyler enters.  As a mule, he has money in his pocket and narcotics secreted where the sun don’t shine.  Regularly absent from the PRU, he becomes a commuter.  He takes a train to and from Canvey Island, where his main contacts are short-fused Sadiq (Marcus Rutherford), one of Simon’s dealers, and the heroin-addicted Izzy (Johanna Stanton) – both, in their different ways, terrifying.  With the help of Sverre Sørdal’s supple cinematography, Blake occasionally interrupts the prevailing perilous squalor of his narrative.  At the end of a day’s work, Tyler sits watching the sun set over the Thames estuary.  Izzy, despite the state she’s in, gives him a lift to the railway station.  After Tyler gets out of the car, a teenage girl gets in:  as Izzy drives off, Blake concentrates on the innocent face of her new passenger.  There’s a brief return to the spot near the football pitch where Tyler once played.  The pitch is in the background of the shot but a million miles away now.  The tonal difference and the rarity of moments like these make them doubly affecting.

    The film begins with a shot of Tyler seated at a table, half-listening to the voice of an unseen woman, who calmly tells him to stop looking at his phone, asks if he knows the term ‘acceptable loss’ and, when the answer is no, gives several examples of what it can mean.  The woman concludes by telling Tyler that, in the business he’s now mired in, he is an acceptable loss.  After describing, as a single, extended flashback, his circumstances and initiation into county lines work, Blake reprises the opening scene, this time with Tyler’s interviewer visible.  She is Bex (Carlyss Peer), his recently appointed case worker at the PRU.  Reiterating her warning about acceptable loss is a basic way of underlining its crucial importance in the story but Bex’s words have a lot more emotional meaning for the viewer this second time around.

    As the dire complications of his work accumulate, things go from bad to worse for Tyler, culminating in a savage attack.  Acid is thrown in his face; he’s then subjected to a protracted beating up – there’s a lot of putting the boot in that’s difficult to watch.  At the same time, Simon – via one of his numerous sidekicks – turns up at Toni’s flat late at night demanding money with menaces.  What happens subsequently in County Lines left me grateful yet sceptical.  It’s a relief that Tyler gets out of his ordeal alive and turns the corner but the new beginning is so overdrawn that it feels like wishful thinking.  I couldn’t see how his mother, by now deeply traumatised, managed to turn her life round as decisively as Toni seems to do.  She manages to borrow the two grand demanded of her and pays Simon off.  She also acquires, instantly and inexplicably, the means to cope with loan repayments, buy new clothes, and start serving healthy home-cooked meals for the family.

    Conrad Khan has acted on screen before but this is his first lead role and Henry Blake directs him admirably.  Khan’s face moves easily between innocence and truculence but has a persistent wariness.  This disappears only when, back home after the attack and a stay in hospital, Tyler breaks down and cries in his mother’s arms – a poignant reminder of how young he really is.  (The scene’s effectiveness is weakened somewhat by Blake’s forgetting about the meal that Toni has just brought to Tyler in bed:  the tray of things has somehow disappeared when he uses both hands to clutch her.)  Kevin Maher complains in the Times that the film is ‘punctuated by awkward dramatic leaps – such as Tyler’s transformation from angel to devil and back again’.  Watching the former transformation, when Tyler loses it and knocks his mother to the kitchen floor, I too was unconvinced by Conrad Khan’s switch into yelling aggression.  On reflection, I found it more plausible – an expression of the macho imperative that propels Tyler but which he has to strain to realise.  Even if that’s a fanciful interpretation of what’s going on, the sequence does get across, upsettingly, that, in the context of domestic abuse, an adolescent male is plenty old enough to harm and intimidate an adult woman.  When the film was shot Khan was in his late teens and Ashley Madekwe in her mid-thirties but she, like him, seems younger – though Toni looks thoroughly (and credibly) worn out, too.

    Harris Dickinson’s work in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017) left little doubt that he was talented though he didn’t seem to me physically or temperamentally right for his role.  As Simon, he’s excellent, blending smooth talk and menace expertly, never overdoing either.  This time, Dickinson looks the part – Simon’s good features and neat appearance are subtly but definitely undermined by the grotty pallor of his complexion.  This is a man proud of his material success and determined, at all times and in various ways, to remind people who’s boss.  In one sequence, we see him in a restaurant with his partner and their little daughter.  Tyler, who makes the mistake of turning up there to interrupt pleasure with business, is brusquely ejected by Simon – a moment that resonates strongly with their first meeting in an eatery, when he got rid of the boys pestering Tyler.   The drugs networks whose workings Henry Blake describes naturally tend to operate across police and local authority boundaries.  Simon, who makes a good living from county lines, is very clear in demarcating his professional and private worlds.

    6 January 2021

     

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