The majority of the action is set in a New York hotel suite inhabited by the Professor (Michael Emil), who, garbed in loose trousers and a Princeton letter sweatshirt, is hard at work finalizing a complex series of mathematical equations that will, he hopes, define the shape of the universe. His intellectual activities are rudely interrupted by the Senator (Tony Curtis) who, full of whiskey, reminds the Professor that he is due to testify before HUAC in the morning, where he should denounce communism and maybe drop a few names along the way. The Professor refuses, the Senator threatens, and soon the Actress (Theresa Russell), who we earlier saw filming the infamous subway grate sequence on location, is knocking on his door. Why, exactly, she seeks out the Professor is a bit of a mystery, except that she urgently wants to connect with him in some way, which first involves her proving to him that she understands the theory of relativity by demonstrating its major principles with flashlights, a toy train, and balloons. The Actress’s presence soon draws the arrival of the Ballplayer (Gary Busey), her angry and estranged husband who immediately assumes that the Professor is another psychiatrist who is trying to seduce his wife.

Amusing as the film sometimes is, screenwriter Terry Johnson, who adapted his own stageplay, never quite transcends the story’s admittedly clever premise. There are some amusing role reversals and tense confrontations that reflect on the essential conflicts in the American psyche, especially in the 1950s, but the characters remain archetypes mired in a limited historical imagination and left to the mercy of the film’s uneven performances. Michael Emil, who is primarily a stage actor, comes off best as the Einstein character primarily because he doesn’t try to play up the Scientist’s mannerisms; rather, he finds a consistently deft balance between the character’s immense intelligence and his constant confusion about the human behavior with which he is constantly confronted. Tony Curtis unsurprisingly plays the Joe McCarthy character, surely one of the most reviled political figures of the 20th century, as a sweaty, drunken, impotent bully; he all but leaves an oily smear on the screen every time he walks by the camera. Gary Busey has some good moments as the insecure, anger-prone Ballplayer, but he never makes a real impact, perhaps because DiMaggio doesn’t have much of a cultural imprint off the baseball diamond. Which brings us to Theresa Russell, whose performance as the Marilyn Monroe figure is maddeningly uneven. When she stops trying to imitate Monroe’s breathy on-screen voice, she succeeds in conveying a woman trapped in her own celebrity and unable to escape. Unfortunately, much of the time she seems like she’s doing an overly mannered impersonation rather than playing a character, and it constantly rips us out of the moment and also counteracts the film’s thematic intent of exposing the artifice of fame and celebrity by simply reinforcing the Monroe persona we have all seen on the movie screen.

Had Insignificance been directed by anyone other than Nicolas Roeg, the fiercely expressive auteur behind Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), and Bad Timing (1980), it likely would have remained fully mired in its stagebound roots, but Roeg finds consistently interesting ways of dragging the material into the cinematic realm. He achieves this partially via his signature blend of jagged cross-cut editing and unmarked flashbacks and flashforwards, most of which either reflect on the characters’ tortured pasts (the Actress being treated like a piece of meat by sexist casting agents, the Ballplayer being pushed to greatness by a relentless father, the Senator being molested by a priest) or their fears of the future, specifically the Professor’s concern about atomic Armageddon, something he, as the Senator reminds him, helped make possible. The fact that Roeg actually stages said Armageddon in the film’s final moments, giving us an impressive, impressionistic display of fiery destruction that exists only in the Professor’s mind, is either his bid to bind all of the film’s fears and dreads into one apocalyptic moment or a desperate attempt to grab our attention after nearly two hours of talk. Either way, it doesn’t fully work, nor does the film as a whole, leaving us with vague impressions, but not the sense of comical profundity that is clearly intended.

Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick

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