Is she investigating what happened to Jennifer or what happened to her? A female detective with a man’s name, who is told by another character she should look more like a woman, and takes pride in her reputation for never showing any queasiness or emotion at a crime scene suddenly starts getting dizzy. But Hoolihan wants to know why, and so she keeps looking. The central concern about who shot Jennifer Rockwell is resolved pretty quickly, which means “case closed” for the police department. That happens a lot in this film, where what may have worked in literary prose comes across as pretentious on screen. The same with the parallels between a detective following clues to solve a crime and a scientist following clues to test a theory, and the references to masks and personae, all of which are more than made clear by the film itself and then unnecessarily explained to us by its characters. In case we cannot figure out that this means she is dedicated investigating the details of other people’s lives but not her own, Amis gives us a character to explain that to us. The detective investigating the death is Mike Hoolihan ( Patricia Clarkson), a recovering alcoholic who says that she cannot remember anything about her past before she joined the police force. She cautions that we are not the center of the universe, and an epigraph before the film tells us that we should not think of ourselves as living in the universe but the universe as living in us. We will hear her again, in flashbacks, describing her search for the “dark heart” that will reveal the secrets of black holes. “The catastrophic death of a star brings new life to the universe,” she tells a small group of students just before her death. Their twin sons went into the family business, but Jennifer became a scientist who looked to the stars for answers. Yes, the daughter of a prominent family led by a former POW turned electronics magnate named Colonel Tom Rockwell ( James Caan) and his wife, Miriam ( Jacki Weaver).
The body on the floor was an astrophysicist named Jennifer Rockwell ( Mamie Gummer).
If some astrophysicists believe that there are an infinite number of universes with every possible variation of our lives occurring simultaneously, then how much can it matter whether we find the answers in this one? If Schrödinger’s Cat can be both alive and dead at the same time in the sealed box, is there even a murder to solve?ĭetectives arrive at the scene of a death at an astronomical observatory. He sets the quintessential quest for truth, a murder mystery, in the context of literal questions about the nature of the universe, or, more accurately, universes. “Out of Blue,” adapted by director Carol Morley from the 1997 Martin Amis novel Night Train, has a self-consciously artsy screenplay with meta air quotes around its air quotes. Sometimes, though, there is a meta-take where the answer is that there may be no answer, or the answer doesn't matter, and the quest for resolution only brings more chaos. Crime is a disruption of the order we attempt to impose through law, and we resolve that tension by finding out who, and, if we can, why. The arc of a storyline with a beginning, middle and end, with actions and consequences, is itself a way of imposing order on chaos. Writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz famously said that the difference between movies and life is that movies have to make sense.
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