Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn join forces for this feature debut from an opera and theater director. Both actors appear to be college professors working with a gifted college student from China. The trailer starts with Meryl asking, "Looking at the stars?" and said student, Liu, responds, "I'm looking at the dark matter." He then scores higher than anyone else ever on the qualifying exam and is welcomed to the program. It looks mostly serious, but there's some silliness with Liu misunderstanding crazy American expressions (he says "Up the bottoms" instead of "Bottoms up" when toasting at a crowded gathering) and crazy Americans misunderstanding Liu (when he says he's in cosmology, his possible girlfriend says, "Wow. Maybe you can give me a makeover"), but it heads quickly back into serious territory. It seems Liu does well in the program, but that he ultimately doesn't understand university politics and he does something that pisses off Aidan Quinn (who had sort of taken him under his wing), and everything falls apart for Liu. The girlfriend leaves him. Aidan turns on him. He ends up alone in the universe, although it looks like Meryl is still pulling for him. The trailer makes it look like he doesn't come back from the chaos, but if there's one thing I've learned in my years watching movies, it's that Meryl Streep is capable of overcoming, so I have hope she'll bring poor Liu back into the fold and out of the darkness.

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