Time, Best Documentary
The documentary branch of the Academy is notorious for ignoring some of the best and most exciting nonfiction films made each year. (Reminder that Hoop Dreams wasn’t even nominated, despite remarkably making the, ahem, cut in the Best Editing category.) So it’s a genuine and welcome surprise to see Garrett Bradley’s Time, a.k.a. the best documentary of 2020, in contention. Bradley approaches the devastating true story of Fox Rich, who fought for two decades to appeal her husband’s extreme prison sentence, from a poetic/experiential angle—assembling home-video footage of Rich’s life in non-chronological order, the better to emphasize how she’s changed over the years and to express the toll all that, yes, time has taken on her family. It’s an unintuitive approach that sacrifices easy narrative clarity in favor of emotional logic. Which, of course, is probably why it won’t win. But like Rich, I’m holding out hope. [A.A. Dowd]