DUTCH is one of those movies that was on basic cable all the time in the '90s and early 2000s. I was never completely enamored with the film. When it was on, I'd maybe watch a few comedic scenes before changing the channel. There was something missing. Nothing major, nothing I could easily identify, but enough to keep me from becoming particularly attached to it. I still feel that way, although having watched it again, I find there's considerably more to appreciate than I previously realized. In fact, I think DUTCH is worth watching once or twice…all the way through, in spite of its flaws.
The setup is simple. At a country-club Thanksgiving party, Natalie Standish runs into her ex-husband Reed, who tells her he has to leave for London in the morning. He hasn't told their son Doyle, who is away at a boarding school in Georgia and expecting to spend the holiday with his father. Natalie calls to break the news, and Doyle accuses her of trying to buy his approval of her new boyfriend. Dutch has a better idea. "There's no better way for two guys to get to know each other than to spend a couple of days in a car," he says, and when Natalie warns him that Doyle doesn't want to know him, he brushes it off. "I've handled some pretty tough birds in my time." When the smoke cleared, he says, he almost always ended up with a new friend.
A working-class man fetching a kid from a fancy school reminded me of OVER THE TOP, where Sylvester Stallone picks his estranged son up from military school and tries to make up for lost time in one long drive. DUTCH takes the same trip and swaps the father for a stand-in, a man with no claim on the boy and every reason to want one.
Class is the movie's first argument, and it announces itself at the party. Natalie tells the women that Reed got her pregnant when she was a barhop at the country club, married her to avoid scandal, and then beat her in court. Asked to point out her new boyfriend when he arrives, she says they'll know him when they see him. Dutch confirms it by telling the room he doesn't care for caviar, since he makes it a rule never to eat anything a fish deposits in a riverbed. Reed is played by Christopher McDonald, who is playing a villain again, and the mustache is a nice touch. When Natalie asks whether he would ever play fair, he answers, "I wouldn't dare lose." That one line covers the whole marriage.
In the car, Doyle takes over the class argument. He lists what gives Dutch away: cheap shoes, a ridiculous hairstyle, a crude vocabulary, and his mother's taste in men. Asked whether working class is bad, Doyle allows that a solid economy needs hand workers, and Dutch tells him he used to drive a cement truck, that his father was a bricklayer, and that his mother worked in a hotel laundry. "You must be very proud," Doyle says. "I am," Dutch answers. But the movie takes care to show that Dutch isn't poor. He says he makes a pretty good living, more than Reed gives Natalie, and that his money doesn't count in Doyle's neighborhood "because I worked for it." Later he admits he had $200 in his wallet when he told Doyle they had $20, suggesting that at least some of their hardship has been self-imposed. When Doyle suggests a telephone, Dutch calls his refusal "old-fashioned, pigheaded, working-class" masculine pride. He isn't proving he can rough it. He's proving he doesn't have to ask anyone for help.
I shudder to think what Doyle would have become without Dutch. He looks like a future Wall Street sociopath, a kid who answers "What makes you think you're so superior?" with "I don't have to think." He threatens to have Teddy written up and predicts a career at Burger King for him. But beneath all that arrogance is a boy who spends most of the movie miserable, and not only because Dutch is there. Teddy's reply, "At least I have a father," is the one insult in that scene he leaves unanswered.
When his mother tells him his father is going to Europe, there's a long silence on the line before he goes after her instead, accusing her of wanting his approval of her new boyfriend. Teddy then comes back to invite him to Thanksgiving at his own parents' house, the same Teddy Doyle mocked for being enrolled because his father is an employee, and Doyle says he couldn't handle that much fun. Later he demands his father's London number from a woman on the phone, insisting he has a letter promising his father would pick him up. Dutch's plan, as Doyle describes it to Brock, is to "drag me around until I break," and his insistence that he doesn't break sounds like a kid with practice. Dutch may not be changing Doyle so much as giving him room to show what was already there.
Dutch is right about one thing: there's no better way for two guys to get to know each other than a couple of days in a car. I've taken plenty of eight- or ten-hour day trips with a friend who didn't have a driver's license, so I did all the driving. With enough tiredness, you eventually become incapable of being anything other than yourself. If the other person still likes you, you've probably got a friend for life. I also took a trip to Northern California with another friend. We were both pretty quiet, and spending hours in a car didn't suddenly make us more talkative. He couldn't stand my leisurely driving, either; by the time we reached Oregon, he'd taken the wheel. But we spent plenty of weekends watching football together, and I don't think either of us needed much conversation to enjoy the other's company. Spending that much time together doesn't necessarily make two people closer. Sometimes it just shows you how different they are, and that tells you little about how close they already were.
Doyle's guard begins to slip during the drive. Dutch starts out in control, with Doyle gagged in the back seat while he drives the back roads and offers an apology of sorts. "I'm not 100% sure those undershorts I jammed in your mouth to shut you up were clean or not," he says. The first real crack comes at the fireworks store, which is based on a real one. According to the AFI Catalog, the producers found a big one in Kimball, Tennessee, while driving the route from Atlanta to Chicago, and Hughes wrote it into the script.
On the second viewing I noticed something smaller, right before Dutch goes in. Doyle starts to get out of the car to follow him, then changes his mind. When Dutch returns, Doyle points out that fireworks are illegal in Illinois, and Dutch says this is Tennessee, so it doesn't matter. Dutch rattles off his haul: M-80s, dragon tongues, Jersey stinkers, and Bombay bugles, along with a bag of pretzels and a deck of racy playing cards. The store shares its lot with a gas station, which Dutch is quick to say is no place to set anything off. Soon Doyle is calling him "a great big, demented child," and Dutch is giggling.
A few other bits worked for me. I missed what might be the best gag of the trip on my first viewing: Dutch gets squirted in the mouth with moisturizer while he sleeps in the front seat, and afterward he keeps licking his lips like he can't quite place the taste. Mickey Jones has a small role as a truck driver, and I was glad to see him, since I know him from his Bob Dylan days and HOME IMPROVEMENT. And those Pan Am bags really were indestructible. I probably still have one in a closet somewhere, picked up at a yard sale.
The turning point comes after Brock and Hailey, the call girls who give the boys a ride to Hammond, drive off with Dutch's wallet, luggage, and last cigar. Doyle had spent the ride talking to Brock, the first person he opens up to. When she tells him maybe he should stop knocking his mom and try to make things work with her, he says that isn't going to happen, then adds, "But I really like talking to you." Dutch sits down at the gas station and tells Doyle to call his mother and give her the message that "the Dutchboy's calling it quits." Doyle objects that it's sick to cut his mom loose because Dutch can't get along with him. "I blew it. I'm sorry. I'm also out of ideas," Dutch says, and I still can't tell whether he means it or is bluffing. Doyle goes to a phone and calls his father instead. A woman whispers that Mr. Standish is sleeping, and Reed asks who it was. "Some kid," she says. When Doyle comes back, he's the one insisting they can make it home. Once Dutch announces he's calling Natalie, Doyle stops him. "It would really mean a lot to me to not have to call my mother for help." It's Dutch's own male-pride argument coming out of Doyle's mouth, and it's the first time he's on Dutch's side.
The shelter scene is one of the better parts of the movie. After they're told to leave a place where Dutch hoped Doyle could wash the cut on his head, a couple asks Dutch, "The boy's your son?" "That's right," Dutch says, and they send the pair to a center for displaced families. At night Dutch asks Doyle to switch cots because his own won't hold him. "How do you know it'll hold me?" Doyle asks. "Because I'm 15,000 cheeseburgers ahead of you in life."
Then a woman tells Doyle that her husband lost his job in June when an auto-parts company went broke, and that they've been living out of the back of their car. The kid who spent the first half of the movie sneering at Dutch's shoes and hairstyle says, "That's kind of hard." When she asks, "You and your daddy?" there's a long pause before he answers, "Yeah." She asks if he has a mother, if she's in Chicago, if he'd like to be with her right now. "Yes," he says, and after a moment, "Yeah, I would." Dutch, within earshot, smiles. It's where Doyle finally begins peeling away that layer of thinking he's better than everyone else. Afterward Dutch tells him he called Natalie and said they were at the Holiday Inn so she wouldn't worry, and asks if that's okay. "No, that's okay," Doyle says. The shelter has become a secret the two of them share.
The ending starts well and then loses its nerve. Reed shows up at Natalie's house claiming he canceled an overseas trip to spend the holiday with Doyle, and Doyle calls him on it: "No, you didn't. I called your house, and a lady answered. You lied to me." Reed makes him choose. "Are you coming with me or are you staying here? Your decision is final." Doyle answers, "I'm staying here, Dad." Meanwhile, there's something different about Dutch in this scene. He keeps his hat on indoors, and with the hat framing his face, all you notice are his eyes. I wonder if that was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers, since he could have taken it off right away.
Dutch's confrontation with Reed afterward is the other part that works, because it feels like something the character would really do. Reed has told Natalie he wants her out by Monday. Dutch gets him up to six months, makes him promise to be more respectful, and tells him to work on being a nice guy with his son because he still loves him. "I'm never gonna be his father," Dutch says. "That's your job. You'd better learn to do it." Earlier at the shelter, Doyle told a stranger that Dutch was his father. Now Dutch is telling the boy's actual father that he has a responsibility no one else can fulfill. It's a surprisingly generous thing to say to a man he despises.
Then dinner starts and it goes off the rails. Dutch sends Doyle for his coat, saying he has something in it for his mother, and fires an air pistol while the table laughs. I know they promised that moment. Dutch threatens it in their first fight, and in the shelter Doyle asks, "You still gonna shoot me in the ass?" "Yes." But the payoff could have come anywhere else in the film. A softer joke would have worked better here.
By the end I was thinking DUTCH mostly needed better editing. I know that isn't literally true. The July 1990 draft screenplay already ends with Dutch pulling an air pistol from behind his back at the dinner table. A softer joke would have required more than a simple cut. But the building blocks for a better movie are all there: the class argument in the car, the misery behind Doyle's sneer, the shelter, Dutch facing down Reed. Some of those repairs wouldn't have taken much. It's hard to say how much of the blame belongs to Hughes and how much to Peter Faiman, a director I'd never heard of who turns out to have made CROCODILE DUNDEE. The gag was on Hughes's page, and it survived into Faiman's finished film. Hughes wrote and directed CURLY SUE three months later, and between the two I'd say he lost a step.
That might also explain why DUTCH never stuck with me on basic cable. The scenes I used to catch before changing the channel were the comedic ones, and the best of the movie is in the parts you only see if you stay.
Final Verdict: 72 out of 100