Silver Dollar Road (Peck, 2023)
In an interview (see link below), director Raoul Peck said that he wanted to make a film in Silver Dolalrs Road that a Black audience could watch and feel “at ease.” He pursued that goal by making it first the story of the Reels family and only later about attempts to take their waterfront property.
The way a story begins frames our expectations about what it is about. The ProPublica article that inspired the documentary begins with Melvin and Licurtis Reels refusing to leave the land they knew their family owned but which the course said had been sold by a relative, without their knowledge, to a real-estate development company. A translation of the story into documentary form might well have focused on the historical development of heir property, inheritance estate laws, and perceived biases in the application of laws in Southern courts. After all, ProPublica claims its mission is to “expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions.”
Silver Dollar Road begins at a picnic birthday celebration for the matriarch of the Reels family. A disinterested viewer might be just as happy to jump into abstract discussions about curiously anachronistic legal concepts, but Peck does not appear to want us to be disinterested. He wants us to see the Reels family as people first and only second as symbolic representations of racial, social, and economic inequalities.
And he is largely successful in introducing us to the family and making us see them as people with lives and personalities beyond their roles in the court case. If that comes at the cost of being less than clear about the court case, viewers may only care if the jury is still out for them about whether or not courts and businesses abuse their power and betray public trust.
We tend to think of people who own land as rich, but we seldom think about the ways in which institutions and regulations can impact, even undercut, those who have it. Many years ago, I visited a rural college campus that was built when the land was cheap but had seen prices skyrocket after the construction of a bridge linked it to a major metropolitan area. On paper, this created wealth for those whose property values increased, but in reality, many of the residents I spoke with could no longer afford the property taxes or insurance to stay in homes they had lived in for decades. I thought about them as I listened to the Reels family talk about their experience in Silver Dollar Road.
Owning land is one thing. Having the money to pay lawyers to protect it, to influence politicians to pass laws to secure it, is something else entirely. Those thoughts made me ill at ease. Maybe the reason I wasn’t already is because it took a movie about a black family’s experience to drive that lesson home.
