Raoul Peck’s documentary about the Reels family’s fight to reclaim their land is just too simplistic and uneven to transcend its print journalism origins.

Based on Lizzie Presser’s 2019 ProPublica/New Yorker article, Raoul Peck’s Silver Dollar Road starts by barreling headfirst. Its first 15 minutes are a crash course of talking heads, introducing family members with broad, expository precision. The film shows them but doesn’t fully introduce them. Rather, it relies on graphics to fashion a sense of context. What the subjects say to the camera may provide an identity for the story at hand, but Peck’s approach renders such words largely textual. The narrative may be propulsive. The film, however, tends to feel stagnant.

The kin in question is the Reels, a Black family who’ve lived on 65 acres of the North Carolina oceanfront for generations. Elijah Reels first owned the property soon after the United States abolished slavery but lost it in 1939 due to back taxes. His son Mitchell bought the property back five years later yet passed away in 1970 without a living will per his distrust of the courts. His descendants continued to live on Silver Dollar Road, but, in the following years, development firm Adams Creek Associates seized the area in pieces for tourist profit. To this day, the Reels’ attempts to reclaim their land continue. If capitalism is a derivative of colonialism, time is another one of its weapons.

The pace at which Silver Dollar Road relays all this plays like an exposition dump. It’s fast enough to almost feel impatient, which, given the 80-plus years this saga fills, is uneven and even distancing in pacing. As if to cushion this, Peck favors slow animations of a family tree to complement drone shots of the land, usually with Alexei Aigui’s treacly, one-note-at-a-time piano score. It’s too literal. Its motion is unspecific to cinema, too static for extended periods. The film is only 100 minutes, but much of its first half borders on this sense of prehension.

Then, around the midpoint, two members of the Reels family are arrested for living on their own land. It’s as if this rise in tension stimulates the film’s fluidity. Peck mines the Reels’ home videos well, reviving the family’s collectivity. Interspersed with talking heads and contemporary footage, the film finds a rhythm in juxtaposing the past and present, letting their respective individualities float to the surface. At its best, it’s contemplative in its passivity: emotionally predicated on memories, the realities that form them, and the systems that threaten them.

But that Silver Dollar Road only really comes to life upon a moment of upheaval is telling. It’s able to form itself around the story’s more traditionally dynamic moments. It’s not, however, able to fully plumb said dynamics on its own. Its literalism, whether in form or structure, simplifies the experience to an almost fatal degree. That’s not to say it’s bad; it never is. At its very worst, it feels like classroom fodder, the film acting as a jumping-off point.

[Director Raoul] Peck does too little to establish the logistics of Adams Creek’s pursuits or the legal loopholes at play.

What exactly, in detail, are the machinations that allow this to unfold? What are the legal foundations on which this utter lack of ethics stands? Beyond the basics, which the documentary tends to shove into its earlier segments, Peck does too little to establish the logistics of Adams Creek’s pursuits or the legal loopholes at play. Their racism and capitalism are apparent. The pragmatism of them still existing in 21st-century America is what the picture neglects to establish.

What ends up feeling like a lack of context undersells the Reels’ plight past the basic sympathy of its audiences. It doesn’t allow long enough stretches of watching the family be. Instead, it cuts through with title cards to clarify rather than explain or deconstruct—or better yet, let its subjects do such themselves. Consistency issues aside, not much here is terribly probing or interrogative. What’s engaging here is due to the story itself, not the vessel it exists in here.

One can’t help but imagine how many more details there are to include here, especially for a story spanning generations. As is, it doesn’t go much beyond the article’s source material. How about more time with the family than around them in anesthetized interview settings? For all they express, the camera facing them doesn’t say much. And it’s unfortunate. They deserve to have a lens that reflects them as well as the world refracts them.

Silver Dollar Road winds around Prime Video on October 20.

Silver Dollar Road Trailer: