Doc Corner: Raoul Peck's 'Silver Dollar Road'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Raoul Peck has proven himself several times over to be one of the great workers of non-fiction today. Whether its biography or history lesson, he applies a deeply clinical look at his chosen subjects without the tar of stale formula or compromised intent. In the Haiti-born filmmakers latest work, he has taken a ProPublica article by Lizzie Presser, “Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It”—a title too long for a film, but which tells you exactly what is at the heart of its story.

For Peck, Silver Dollar Road is actually part biography and part history lesson, taking in a large family tree and the forces that came together to break their connection to the place they’ve known as home since emancipation.

In some ways, Silver Dollar Road is uncharacteristic for the director of I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes. Those productions had a grandness, thanks in part to their powerful and all-consuming subject matter (the history of racism and colonialistic genocide respectively) but also Peck’s cinematic storytelling. Silver Dollar Road is comparatively smaller in scope; you might call it humble. It is consumed with a relatively small story about relatively small people, but Peck’s familiar incisiveness is on display in how he navigates the racism inflicted upon this family. Still, there is something slightly conventional about it that is a little bit frustrating in the wake of Brutes, which is just about the greatest work of filmed art so far this decade. Maybe I'm just being picky.

The film is at its best when it focuses on what is being lost rather than why. The culture and the family and the stories of moments in time at its core is so strong and full of generational love that it becomes somewhat disappointing when the film gets lost in the weeds of a legal case that threatens all of that. While it may just appear to be the story of a block of land, it is these moments that make it the sort of thing that implores the audience to see it as much more. Hearing and seeing how this land has nourished generation after generation (after generation) of this family and what it means beyond a mere roof over their head. It calls us to see it is as an indictment of continued racism and the long reach of white wealth and societal capitalism to continue stealing the land of black Americans well past the days of post-emancipation and the KKK.

Unlike other Peck works, though, Silver Dollar Road leans more heavily into something approaching lightness and even feel-good. There’s potency there, of course, but it comes alongside cookouts and parties, and trips on the shrimping vessels that have been the Reels family financial lifeblood, and kids running through the green open spaces, covered in vines like a jungle, down to the beach of white sand that has given so much to the family over the years. It makes something of a refreshing change of pace for the director even if his best work remains that which is the most dramatically confronting. With Silver Dollar Road, Peck allows a gentler curiosity to peek through the injustice and that’s something I suspect is a reflection of its subjects rather than any real mellowing of the director’s talents—of which the film is still nevertheless a strong testament to.

Release: Currently streaming on Prime Video.

Award chances: I’d say it’s too low-key for the Academy, but never underestimate somebody who is ‘in the club’ (Peck was nominated for I Am Not Your Negro).