Silk Road (2021)
Smoke and Heat
On rare occasions, the best way to critique a film is by examining other critiques of it. Tiller Russell’s Silk Road currently sits at a 53% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 40% audience score (definitely an event to bookmark the next time someone whines about critics and “real people” not seeing eye to eye on the site). Perusing the reviews, several commonalities emerge.
I’ll paraphrase some of my favorites:
“Nothing happens in this lifeless, so-called thriller.”
“The movie is just a thinly veiled libertarian screed.”
“Silk Road is like The Social Network for stoners.”
No offense to my fellow feisty fruit-tossers, but I have to wonder what you’re smoking—’cause you’ve clearly been ripped off.
Yes, Silk Road is about an egotistical kid who loses friends and runs afoul of the law while revolutionizing the Internet. But that’s only half the story, and maybe a third of the point. Nick Robinson plays Ross Ulbricht, an aimless San Francisco twentysomething whose ambitions always outpace his interest in actually seeing things through. He’s also a strident anti-government proselytizer who would rather discuss taxes than tequila shots at parties.
In 2013 he discovered that he could use Bitcoin and the U.S. Postal service to mail himself a small amount of marijuana. From there, he launched Silk Road, a dark web marketplace that, by the end of its two-year reign, had become a $50 million global enterprise dealing in the most illicit drugs and weaponry known to man.
Writer/director Russell has created a brilliant cosmic foil for Ulbricht in Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), a disgraced DEA agent who’s been taken off the streets and shoved behind a desk in Cybercrimes. A gruff, no-bullshit bad-guy stomper, Bowden finds himself taking orders from people half his age in a job whose equipment and methods utterly baffle him (he tells an informant that he needs to know “how to buy dope on YouTube”.).
Bowden’s predicament is played for more laughs than are necessary in a crime drama, but beneath the boomer gags lies a story of a true believer in law enforcement whose career led him down an utterly isolating path. He’s lost the trust of his former co-workers and family, and no one in his new department expects anything out of him—which opens the door to a one-man covert operation that ultimately leads to the downfall of Ross Ulbricht, and Bowden himself.
True, Silk Road isn’t flashy. True, there are dozens of shots of people excitedly texting or banging on keyboards, or pacing back and forth waiting for a really important call. I can imagine this being a chore to sit through for anyone who’s never had to send an urgent message; anticipate bad news; or receive news about the well-being of a loved one. Or anyone who’s never seen the aforementioned blockbuster and multi-Academy Award-winner The Social Network.
The Social Network is the easiest (and laziest) point of comparison. A better gauge of Silk Road’s success is to think of it as a 21st Century Heat. Robinson and Clarke’s parallel metanarratives and slowly converging storylines aren’t as sexy as those of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. But Silk Road presents a heady and emotionally satisfying cautionary tale, where Michael Mann’s cold, glossy shoot-’em'-up seemed to care more about its stars’ historic meet-up than about making the audience care about its characters’ fates.
Don’t get me wrong: Heat’s daylight traffic jam shoot-out is guaranteed to be part of the “In Memoriam” highlight reel of every actor who appeared in the scene—but that’s pretty much all I think of when I think of that movie. And sure enough, whenever Heat comes up in conversation, the first thing out of someone’s mouth is, “Dude! Did you know that shoot-out was based on a true story?”
A legacy is a legacy, I guess. But when I think about Silk Road, I’ll remember the fun little narrative bridges that Tiller Russell (working from a Rolling Stone article by David Kushner) peppered throughout the movie; I’ll marvel at the thematic rug-pull in which a film loaded with libertarian speechifying (taken from Ulbricht’s real-life journals and blog posts) wound up not being as sympathetic to “the cause” as a careless viewer might observe.
I’ll also never forget Jason Clarke’s final scene with his wife and daughter. I won’t spoil it, but you’ll recognize the kind of scene it is from a hundred thousand cop shows and crooked-cop movies. As much as Silk Road is the story of Ross Ulbricht, it’s really about the man* who brought him to justice and the price he paid for doing it the only way he believed the system would allow.
Dismiss Silk Road as “The Social Network for stoners” at your own peril. My eyes were plenty red by the end of this movie, but it had nothing to do with drugs.
If you’d like to learn more about Silk Road, watch my spoiler-free interview with writer/director Tiller Russell.
