If you were to sit through Dark Matter with no knowledge of the story, the ending is bound to be a shock — as much for its “that came out of nowhere” quality as its unexpected violence.
The feature film debut of Chinese opera director Chen Shi-Zheng (The Peony Pavilion), Dark Matter tells the story of a promising Chinese cosmology student, Liu Xing (played by Curse of the Golden Flower’s Liu Ye), who comes to an American university to study under the brilliant professor Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn). At first, things look positive for Liu — Reiser takes him under his wing, and he befriends a local socialite (Meryl Streep) who has an affinity for all things Chinese. But as Liu’s research puts him in conflict with his mentor, he finds himself more marginalized until his promising future is all but destroyed, leading to a desperate final act of violence.
Although the story was inspired by a shooting spree on a college campus in 1991, viewers will most likely be reminded of last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech. But such a comparison is a disservice to the film. Although both the reel and real-life incidents revolve around a young Asian man pushed to the brink, Chen and first-time screenwriter Billy Shebar are interested in going deeper and avoiding all hints of the sensational.
Liu Xing is a spiritual cousin of sorts to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in the 1970s classic Taxi Driver. Chen and Shebar set out to present a character study of a man who, like Bickle, longs to fit into a community but, due to circumstances both external and internal, cannot. He sees no choice but to lash out and destroy the very community that has rejected him.
But this is also the source of the film’s main flaw. Whereas in Taxi Driver it was clear that there was something potentially disturbing about Bickle from the start, we see no evidence of that in Liu. He seems to be a well-adjusted young man with a bright future, someone intelligent and ambitious enough to make a name for himself elsewhere after being dissed by Reiser. I never quite believed this was a guy who would have no choice but to do what he does at the end.
The cast is uniformly solid. Several reviews have criticized Streep’s performance, and though this is not her best work, she paints a vivid portrait of a woman who seems to have everything, but needs to fill her emptiness by reaching for all that is foreign and exotic. Her final scene with Liu when he has returned to her as a cosmetics salesman is superbly realized — with a tension, sadness and even a dose of sexuality that shows what Dark Matter could have been had the rest of the film been infused with such electricity.
Still, Dark Matter is a rare, genuine attempt to explore the dark underbelly of the Asian immigrant experience with depth. It makes an ambitious attempt to show us something new, and though not completely successful, it’s hard to look away.
Dark Matter is currently playing in selected cities and opens in
San Francisco on May 2.