"DARK MATTER": Off the Map in the Bay Area

"DARK MATTER," starring Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn and Ye Liu
Directed by Chen Shi-Zhen.
Based on a true story of a 1991 school shooting.
In English and Mandarin (subtitled)

Unfortunately, the thought-provoking film "Dark Matter" didn't get the attention it deserves. Opera director Chen Shi-Zheng’s first feature film lasted only two weeks in Bay Area theatres, which is a shame when some multiplexes devoted three screens to the panned "Speed Racer." Now, Bay Areans must wait for the DVD or search for a showing on Cable or in other areas.

"Dark Matter" is based on a tragic, true story that took place in 1991. The film opened in April, 2008, to reviews ranging from middling to bad. Yet, reading between the lines, the film seemed a much better vehicle than what the critics said. And it is. Basically it’s about a genius university student and an egotistical professor working on theories about how the universe began. There's dialogue about astronomy. quantum physics, black holes, dark matter, string theory, and galaxies - - fascinating subjects dear to my dilettante heart. The film stars one of my favorite actors, Aidan Quinn, as Jacob Reiser, a noted professor of astrophysics at a university based in Utah. The highly-praised Meryl Streep is perfectly cast as Joanne Silver, a wealthy university patron and Sinologist, who forms a special bond with student émigré, Liu Xing (“shooting star“ in Chinese). Xing is played sensitively and sympathetically by award winning Chinese actor Ye Liu.

The film follows Xing’s life at the university the way a telescope tracks a doomed star destined to fall to earth, destroying matter as well as itself in its descent. Xing has immigrated to the US on a scholarship from Beijing. Through Xing's letters to his parents, Shi-Zhen engagingly contrasts scenes of Xing's life at the American university and his parents' hard-scrabble existence in China. He is both awed and befuddled by the wide expanses of the American West, and practically genuflects in the affable Reiser‘s presence. As Xing’s mentor and professor, Reiser initially sees Xing’s intelligence as a reflection on himself. He insists Xing cal him "Jake", which goes against Xing's culture. Reiser sends Xing off to a sweat-shop like lab where a half-dozen other young Asian students toil away at computers, churning out tests of astronomical equations. They introduce Xing to American pop culture with the help of porn films and TV, and beef up his English vocabulary.

Joanne Silver and her patient, tolerant husband - - generically named Herb (Bill Irwin), who’s in the Asian import-export business - - arrange sight-seeing tours for the students. They invite the brilliant Xing to their cocktail parties to show him off to benefactors.

Xing’s focus is to prove that the universe existed before the Big Bang, which, he contends, remained hidden due to dark matter, invisible even using the most sophisticated equipment. Xing says that astrophysicists know of the phenomenon of dark matter because of the gravitational pull it exerts on other bodies in the cosmos. He explains this theory to Silver (and us), and the fact that the universe is at least 70% dark energy and dark matter, out of which, he believes, the universe was born.

The Asian students are there, Reiser subtly implies, to support the Reiser Model, his theory of the universe‘s beginnings. Xing doesn’t get that he is supposed to be working for him. He is obsessed with his own work which begins to irritate Reiser. Xing suffers a blow when he spots a rival from his Beijing University days, Zang Ming (Tsao Lei) shaking hands with Reiser in his office. Ming speaks perfect, measured, non-accented English, even among his peers. While Xing strikes out with an American tea shop clerk, Ming is married to a talented Chinese entertainer and has a new baby. In the lab, Xing asks him why he changed his Chinese first name to “Laurence”. We know the answer. Director Shi-Zheng included scenes of the happy couple baptizing their baby; and, at a faculty party, the wife sings Chinese pop and pulls off a hokey final scene from “Madama Butterfly.”

When once again Reiser ignores Xing’s theories, Xing manages to get published in a prestigious astronomy journal, infuriating Reiser. Reiser’s contemporaries deal his inflated ego a blow by complimenting Xing in Reiser’s presence. Xing has gone too far.

There’s an Einsteinian moment in a small kitchen with Xing and his friends. He has been working on his idea of proving dark matter by using string theory, but he can’t get a handle on it. The camera focuses on Xing staring into a pot of boiling rice. The boiling kernels float to the top. Suddenly, he jumps up and shouts the Mandarin equivalent of “Eureka!” subtitled on the screen as “I got it!” He dashes off his findings on a yellow legal pad, tears off the pages, and races to the university, bumping into Reiser on the stairs on the way to his office. Grudgingly, Rieser takes his papers, then complains to his colleagues about Xing’s sloppy presentation; yet they have to admit to him, it’s genius.

Meanwhile, Reiser lauds Xing’s rival for his work on the Reiser Model. Reiser disdains comments from fellow professors (except for one toady) on the brilliance of Xing’s work and shoots Xing down at every opportunity. The unkindest cut of all comes when Xing is passed over for his Ph.D in favor of his mediocre rival. Ye Liu is a wonderful actor. Outside of later scenes depicting him as an enraged man, tearing off the dark blue dress shirt Silver bought him to wear for his dissertation (“Dress for success!”), he conveys his pain, his distress, in stillness and through his deep, dark eyes. He cannot understand how this can be happening to him in this land of opportunity.

A heartbreaking scene occurs between Liu and Streep when, in her glass and stressed-concrete mountainside home, he makes a blundering, feeble attempt to sell her a line of beauty products, the only work he grossly, mistakenly, believes he’s qualified for. The scene is painful to watch. His hands tremble applying cream to Streep’s aging face; he’s clumsy. He has failed, he’s lost face.

The film ends tragically. One critic went so far as to say that it should have ended fifteen minutes before it did. I’m not giving anything away when I say that Xing methodically shows up at his rival’s presentation and shoots him, Reiser, and a few other faculty members, then goes home and commits suicide. But that’s what really happened. Why is it okay to read or hear about such a shooting in the media, like what happened at Virginia Tech, but not to see this kind of real event portrayed as fiction in a film? It has been said that the Chinese student’s real professor was much more sympathetic than Quinn’s depiction. Still, who can really know what motivated Xing to snap, or say what exactly happened, since he is dead. We can only speculate as we do when pondering the birth of the universe.