John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#35 —Joanna Silver, a university patroness with a penchant for Chinese culture.
MATTHEW: On paper, the prospect of Meryl Streep offering her time and talents to an innovative Chinese director’s micro-budgeted filmmaking debut is immediately intriguing. Dark Matter sounds like a welcome divergence for an actress who has seldom strayed from inside Hollywood’s gates over the course of her 30 years in the industry. Noted opera helmer Chen Shi-Zheng’s first foray behind the camera is loosely based on the 1991 University of Iowa shooting, in which Gang Lu, a gifted Ph.D. graduate in the school’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, murdered five people on campus after being passed over for a prestigious dissertation prize, Shi-Zheng’s drama is a work of no small audacity, one in a scattering of American films that have dramatized the unrelenting pressure placed on young Chinese immigrants to provide and succeed in a country that has already stacked the deck against them.
But Dark Matter quickly dashes the hopes one might have harbored for Streep’s curious venture into post-Sundance indie cinema...
Liu Ye stars as Liu Xing, a graduate student newly arrived at a Salt Lake City university to study cosmology with the prestigious Professor Reiser (Aidan Quinn). Liu’s intellect and diligence make him the professor’s prized pupil, but his insistence on furthering his own theory of dark matter — and perhaps even surpassing the work of his flighty mentor — drives a wedge between the two men, ultimately turning this rising star into persona non grata in his chosen field. Streep is all concerned glances and soothing tones in her supporting part of Joanna Silver, the school’s primary sponsor of scholarship students like Liu and a woman who has immersed herself in a connoisseurship of all things Chinese, possibly to distract from a home life of evident emptiness. Never mind that the film never comes close to critiquing the character’s Sinophilia, which manifests itself in the collection of objects and protégés alike.
Dark Matter is an overworked farrago, from its dirt-cheap efforts at outer-galaxy stylization to its tastelessly-constructed school shooting finale to its unnerving dialogue scenes, so many of which evince the tin-earned, energy-depleting phoniness of a flagging improv sketch. To her credit, Streep, sporting golden curls that are oddly reminiscent of Sophie Zawistowska’s, comes as close as she can to teasing out something approaching a specific character, at least as much as this film, with its bewildering clash of the hokey, the flamboyant, and the realistic, will allow her to. The actress is never less than an inviting personality, especially when trying to establish a purposeful connection to Ye, and finds several gradations on the plummy, moneyed benefactress, although few impressions really stick.
The always welcome Bill Irwin appears sporadically as Joanna’s absentee husband, and both actors work carefully to depict an unhappy marital bond without simply playing bitter pills, even as the script fails to give them anywhere to take their efforts.
In most movies, Streep’s unpredictable inflections and off-the-cuff gestures are cherry-on-top pleasures from an actress who cannot help but seek to please; here, they’re life vests that deflate the second we grab ahold of them. Dark Matter is one of those performances whose only merits are the ways in which Streep manages to not embarrass herself. As in The House of the Spirits and Before and After, Streep could have probably cruised through this movie while just being herself, but she puts in her best effort, despite the often risible incidents she’s asked to enact. John, which of these woebegone scenes are your, uh, favorite?
JOHN: Wait, Tommy Wiseau didn’t write and direct Dark Matter? Wait, this is not an NYU film student’s senior thesis? Wait, Taylor Schilling had a career after this movie? Reader, it’s that bad. Let’s generously attribute this trainwreck as the result of styles, languages, and forms getting lost in translation, from opera to film, from Chinese to American stylizations, from real-world incident to its filmic representation. Dark Matter premiered at Sundance just months before the tragedy at Virginia Tech, and due to the unfortunate similarities the distributor shelved the film until April 2008, where it quietly slipped into some theaters with almost zero press coverage. (It remains Streep’s lowest grossing film, failing to crack even the hundred-thousand mark.) I desperately wish that Streep had given interviews on a press tour for the film to describe exactly what piqued her interest, but let’s infer it was the tony pedigree of Chen Shi-Zheng or perhaps the timeliness of the school shooting subject matter. I genuinely wonder (read: doubt) if Streep read a script before signing onto the project. In Dark Matter, Streep is hopelessly stranded and prone to rehashing her flighty and affected shtick to pass off ludicrous dialogue in ways that almost never cohere. It’s a supporting role that could just as easily be cut from the film.
In my “favorite” scene, Liu tries to sell Joanna face cream. At this point, Liu’s dissertation has been rejected, and he is now inexplicably selling beauty products. (Hey, ever notice how cosmetology sounds like cosmology? Thank you to Taylor Schilling as a barista for making this joke in error, but a real big thank you to Billy Shebar for actually writing this plot line into the script.)
Liu saunters onto Joanna’s property, who’s laying on her couch when he rings her bell. “Ah! Liu Xing! What a wonderful surprise! I was just thinking about you. I can’t look at the sky without thinking of dark matter,” she admits as though she were a child forbidden to ponder such profound ideas. Joanna knows that his dissertation has been rejected and her eyes well at the sight of this brilliant but spurned scholar as if he were her own son, “You, sell?” she asks. “Just to pass the time,” he sheepishly responds, trying to wrestle a cream that came loose out of his bag. Ye can barely make eye contact with Streep as he begins rubbing lotion on her forearms and hands. This moment is shot and played with the puzzling possibility of romance, even as the clumsy assortment of creams and sprays laid out on Joanna’s coffee table make for a comic gesture that is completely misplaced in tone. Finally, Liu reaches out to dab Joanna’s cheek with cream. Joanna is startled, and Liu can barely apply more than a rotation before her eyes well up, which she lies and blames on an “allergic reaction.”
There is a kernel of a movie in Dark Matter — you can somewhat sense it in the juxtapositions between Xing’s deceitful letters home overlaid with his parents’ menial labor back in China. Criticizing such a small and evidently well-intentioned film isn’t fun. As Joanna, Streep is a philanthropist who helps Chinese students achieve success in America, but Streep herself is also playing benefactor here; her presence alone assured funding and distribution for Dark Matter, without which the film might never have been produced or seen by audiences, American or otherwise. Yet, when faced with the prospect of actually watching Dark Matter, fans and casual viewers alike should make like Joanna at the film’s finale and run.