Joel on Film

If nothing else about The Dutchman is true, it’s quite clear that co-writer/director Andre Gaines’ film escalates toward its loaded and knotty climax. At that point, the question is whether this story has been escalating toward something meaningful or worthwhile, which is much more open-ended. It all seems to swirl around a frankly bizarre gimmick, which is actually one of two gimmicks, depending upon how we and the filmmakers see it at any given moment.

Basically, the screenplay is an adaptation of the 1964 stage play of the same name, written by Amiri Baraka at a time when racial tension was obviously quite thick, and the dynamic between its pair of protagonists, a Black man and a white woman living in New York City, is loaded with that tension, as well as a lot of sexuality and toxicity. The play was set in the time when it was written, but this film adaptation has shifted the action into the present day for reasons that might have to do with the almost unspeakably awful politics of its source material’s creator. The shift in setting and period might be odd, but given what one can easily find out about Baraka with a simple bit of research, it might also have been akin to pouring salt on the wound to retain the old backdrop.

Anyway, here we have Clay (André Holland) and Lula (Kate Mara), who are made richer as characters by the actors portraying them than one can probably assume they were on the page, either in this screenplay (co-written by Qasim Basir) or as a stage production. They Meet Cute—or so we would assume—on a high-speed train, are immediately and irrevocably drawn to each other in a carnal and visceral sense, and engage in a series of intense physical and sensual flirtations that Holland and, especially, Mara both clearly relished the opportunity to play. What follows is a regression from that initial, superficial bond, because Lula is as much a total cipher as she is an unthinkable racist in ways that no one involved in this film production could possibly reconcile.

Indeed, the lengths to which the filmmakers go to communicate her racism, which are somehow subtle at first and eventually threaten to ignite the film stock (or digital file, depending on the form) with microaggressions that quickly morph into macrocosmic counterparts, are so brutally offensive that Mara’s good performance begins to take on entirely different qualities. It is important to remember that, under certain circumstances, precise craft can become a paradoxically negative trait, and that’s very much the case here. The more we are convinced by and acknowledge the commitment of Mara in this role, the less we are able to stomach or accept this character—which is, well, something worth noting, at least.

Somehow, the movie is quite a bit better than a lot of this review has suggested so far, and that’s because Gaines has surely committed to a specific tone of intense misanthropy and Holland has committed to cutting through that unpleasantness with a generously compassionate portrayal of a relatively broad stereotype. He and his wife Kaya (Zazie Beetz) are not doing too well these days, and they meet in the opening scene with a therapist played by Stephen McKinley Henderson. The professional sees something in this relationship and decides to test it by giving Clay a copy of Dutchman to read.

Yes, this is another one of those movies that incorporates metatextual elements to undergird the story it’s telling, but here, it just comes across as a gimmick, especially in a climax that turns everything on its ear to redefine what we have seen or think we have seen. Henderson arrives throughout as multiple characters in a position to help by simply being present, but that turns out to be a distraction from the main narrative thread between Clay and Lula. Every time we return to that series of discussions and foreplay, meanwhile, we’re pointedly back in the vicinity of Lula and want to escape.

All these feelings are, generally speaking, ok to have about a movie that wants to challenge our notion of sympathy, but The Dutchman has only its own unpleasantness to fall back on. It hinges entirely upon a character unworthy of the actress playing her or the audience being subjected to her, and as simultaneously strained and mesmerizing as the final result can be, it’s about as hollow as it sounds, too.

Rating: ** (out of ****)