FILM FRENZY

André Holland and Kate Mara in The Dutchman (Photos: Rogue Pictures)

By Matt Brunson

THE DUTCHMAN
★★½ (out of four)
DIRECTED BY Andre Gaines
STARS André Holland, Kate Mara

A black businessman finds himself in Dutch in The Dutchman, a modern translation of Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman. The original employed its characters to explore not only the tense relationship between whites and blacks in the U.S. but also the very definition of black masculinity; this update tries to build on those themes, with mostly successful results.

André Holland plays Clay, who’s experiencing marital difficulties after he learns that his wife Kaya (Zazie Beetz) has had an affair. After the pair conclude a marriage counseling session with Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson) — one in which the analyst hands Clay a copy of the Dutchman play (thus immediately establishing this as a meta movie) — Clay heads to the subway. He doesn’t even make it to one of the cars before he’s accosted by two white police officers because, well, we know why. Once he’s deemed harmless and allowed on board, he’s approached by a white woman named Lula (Kate Mara), who sits next to him and begins flirting outrageously. She soon pulls out an apple, in essence identifying herself as a White Eve to his Black Adam (not the DC antihero, obviously).

Depending on the production, the one-act play can run from 30 minutes to 55 minutes; the latter was also the length of a 1966 film adaptation that starred Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. and marked the directorial debut of Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter). This new version clocks in at 94 minutes, meaning that writer-director Andre Gaines and co-scripter Qasim Basir have found ways to expand the original text. While the entirety of the play took place on the train, this picture hits other New York locations — the switch from the subway to places above ground only enhances the religiopolitical slant of the story, as more than once Clay is forced to travel down to Hell and back.

Even leaving the subway doesn’t rid Clay of Lula, as she continues to pester him. Before long, she’s making his life a living hell, whether falsely crying rape when he tries to leave her apartment or making a spectacle of herself at a fundraising event where both his wife and his best friend (Aldis Hodge) are present. These individual scenes are uncomfortable and thus effective, but by moving away from the subway, the overall story is no longer able to contain and compartmentalize its allegorical beats. This isn’t a problem with Clay, who feels both like a symbol and a real person, but it renders the character of Lula slightly ridiculous. She’s now just a boogey(wo)man, the monster under the bed — a POV accentuated by some Room 237 sleight of hand shots.

As for the play’s downbeat ending, it’s scuttled here in favor of a more hopeful conclusion, one which is then followed by the sort of narrative twist that lost its freshness about 75 years ago. That first change might seem like the greater offense, but that’s not the case. Unlike the coda, which feels like a copout, the preceding plot pirouette works nicely. It may perform a 180 on the source material, but it makes sense for a modern era in which hope and change, while not always givens, are at least within respectable reach.