‘The Dutchman’ Review: André Holland and Kate Mara Star in an Uneven Update of the Provocative Play

In The Dutchman, Andre Gaines retrofits Amiri Baraka’s caustic play about a fatal encounter between a reserved Black man and a roguish white woman for the modern age. He intensifies the dramatic work’s surrealist undertones and takes the central couple’s story above ground. No longer confined to the claustrophobic interior of a train car, Clay (André Holland) and Lula (Kate Mara) gain greater contemporary resonance but also lose some of their edge. 

When Dutchman opened at the Cherry Lane Theater in 1964, its acerbic take on the relationship between white and Black Americans shocked audiences. One critic called the Off-Broadway production, which later won an Obie award, “an explosion of hatred.” He wondered: “If this is the way even one Negro feels there is ample cause for guilt as well as alarm, and for the hastening of change.” 

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This slim play (it was only half an hour) debuted during a transformative period for America and Baraka. As a new generation sloughed off the integrationist dreams of their Civil Rights forbears in favor of the Black Power Movement’s call for self-determination, Baraka renegotiated his position as a white literary darling and embraced a racial pride reinforced by righteous anger. Dutchman is uninhibited, forceful in its criticisms and condemnations of Black people who refuse to acknowledge the acute pain of racial violence in America. At the time of its production, Baraka was divorcing his first wife, the white Jewish poet Hettie Jones, and parts of the play sound like a writer speaking to a version of himself he’s in the process of abandoning. It’s fitting, then, that Dutchman was one of the last works Baraka published under his birth name LeRoi Jones. 

Anthony Harvey’s 1967 film adaptation, which the Museum of Modern Art recently revived, effectively captured the no-holds-barred quality of Baraka’s race parable. That adaptation showed at the Venice Film Festival, where Shirley Knight won Best Actress for her charged portrayal of Lula. Harvey’s Dutchman revels in Baraka’s knotty rage and unrelenting nihilism. Here, Clay, played by Al Freeman Jr., is a fool too easily lured by Lula’s unhinged seduction, all but assuring his destruction. Gaines makes Clay a little more discerning in The Dutchman, which premiered at SXSW. He trades the baby-faced professional (in Baraka’s play Clay is 20 years old) for a prototypical race man trying to save his marriage and build a new future for Harlem. 

We meet Clay during a challenging couple’s therapy session with his wife Kaya (Zazie Beetz) and their cheekily named analyst Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson). The atmosphere is tense with the discomfort of their marital row. Kaya wants her husband to open up more, to share his professional and personal burdens with her. Clay, still reeling from Kaya’s infidelity, recoils at this request. He’s also wrestling with an acute sense of alienation — that double consciousness that W.E.B. DuBois wrote about in the early 20th century — which makes him feel deeply misunderstood and even more reluctant to share.

But in order to save his marriage, Clay needs to disinter buried emotions. Dr. Amiri keeps him after the meeting to discuss alternative paths to exhumation. The beady-eyed doctor, with an unnervingly calm energy, wonders if Clay should also cheat on Kaya and then asks if the young businessman has ever heard of Dutchman. 

Perhaps aware of the canonical nature of Baraka’s play and the pressures that come with adapting it, Gaines fashions The Dutchman as a meta-narrative. The director, who wrote the screenplay with Qasim Basir (Destined), counters Baraka’s oppressive nihilism with an almost ill-fitting earnestness.

Part of what made the original Dutchman so potent is that its scorched-earth tone was a tool, a way for Baraka to lay bare honest feelings. Gaines modernizes the narrative —  this Clay lives in the age of Black-led economic revitalization efforts, cell phone recordings of police violence and widely accessible therapy — and heightens the haunting atmosphere, but what he wants to say is more muddled. He circles, more than advances, theories about fate and the role the past plays in the present, and seems most confident when amplifying Baraka’s work with genre tropes. The director toys with jump scares and mirrors, rearranges our sense of time and experiments with off-kilter camera angles (Frank G. DeMarco is the DP) to build a sense of dread. And he taps frequent David Lowery collaborator Daniel Hart to compose a chilly and foreboding score. This version of The Dutchman operates best as a commercially appealing introduction to Baraka’s work. 

When Clay meets Lula on the train heading uptown, he’s preparing a speech for a fundraiser, a spectacular gathering of Black elites whom he and his friend Warren (Aldis Hodge) hope will back their glitzy developmental project in Harlem. She sidles up to him and the pair quickly fall into the grooves of their roles. Holland plays Clay with a bit more wariness than his predecessors. He’s skeptical of this woman who has never heard of personal space and tries, with more conviction, to get rid of her. Mara gives a solid performance as Lula, but Knight’s portrayal trails it like a shadow.

Lula is not deterred by Clay’s rejection, and once she fishes the gleaming red apple from her bag The Dutchman gets on its way. The pair verbally tussle, relying on Baraka’s charged dialogue, before moving above ground, where their story takes unexpected turns.

Gaines uses these moments to make the narrative his own. Some additions work better than others. The Dutchman is at its weakest when the director-writer brings all the underlying tension to the surface and makes subtext literal. Later conversations between Clay and Dr. Amiri, in which the latter explains everything, don’t leave much room for the audience to make their own connections. But others, as when Clay and Lula arrive at the fundraiser, do. There’s genuine tension in this scene, as Lula chaotically maneuvers the party, toying with Clay’s life and reputation. Private fears become public and Gaines sharply renders the stress of Clay’s twoness. 

Additional moments like these, in which Gaines and his actors find their own way through the text, would have made The Dutchman a more cohesive, if not necessarily cutting, adaptation. But as it stands, the film, while occasionally entertaining, can feel too jagged — as if caught between the old wills of its source material and the new curiosities of its director.