Rediscover: Insignificance - Movie Review, Music Review, Book ...

Rediscover:

Insignificance

Dir: Nicolas Roeg

1985

Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.

On a hot summer night in 1954, a magical piece of American history is about to unfold. Throughout the sultry darkness, four of the 20th century's most important figures will meet, share ideas, fight and walk away changed. If these encounters, some by chance and others by design, did actually occur, they would rival the coming together of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X or the Yalta Conference.

Leave it to the imagination of director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth) to create an alternate evening of American history in Insignficance, recently released by the Criterion Collection. Working with English dramatist Terry Johnson (who adapted his 1981 play for the screen), Roeg's mind trip of a film questions humanity, celebrity, nuclear weapons, the Cold War and the theory of relativity in a slim 108 minutes. We first see the blonde bombshell known simply as the Actress (Roeg's then wife Theresa Russell) as her white dress is blown upwards by a vent and she giggles while pushing it back down. Her husband, known as the Ballplayer (Gary Busey), is an aging slugger for the New York Yankees. He glowers nearby as she hops in a car and gives him the slip. Meanwhile, the Professor (Michael Emil), a German physicist with a crazy shock of white hair and thick mustache, paces his hotel, madly scribbling down mathematical equations. He is about to get a visit from the Senator (Tony Curtis, constantly oozing sweat like an incorrigible Uriah Heep), a fanatic bent on crushing Communism in the United States. Though the characters are never named, they are plainly Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joseph McCarthy, and, for a brief night, all four intersect in the Professor's hotel room.

Although it's set in 1954, Insignificance couldn't be more firmly rooted in 1985. As the Professor dreams of nuclear annihilation in 1954, the nation in 1985 was gripped in the dying embers of the Cold War. In the '50s, the rising cult of celebrity began to reach a fever pitch (now we wouldn't dream of a day without a Kardashian headline) as the lives of the stars such as Monroe and DiMaggio became more important to the public than those of Eisenhower or MacArthur. Fast forward to 1985 and one of these newly important stars would be sitting in the White House.

But being famous in America is a blessing and a curse. The Actress is a product of the Hollywood machine. When her ample ass and big breasts aren't enough to win her an audition, as we see in a flashback, she dyes her hair blonde to conform to the image even more. Behind her veneer of smiles and baubles, she is wrestling with miscarriages and a disintegrating marriage. The Ballplayer, once an important fixture on the Yankees, knows his salad days are behind him and impulsively opens packs of baseball cards to find his likeness. The Senator is so lost down the rabbit hole of his quest to do right that he cries when he cannot perform in bed. Finally, the Professor is so haunted by the part he played in the development of nuclear arms that he carries a watch stopped by the explosion in Japan as a tangible reminder of how his quest for knowledge unleashing a Pandora's box of evil onto the world.

Like Roeg's prior work, Insignificance is told in a non-linear narrative as pieces of the past creep into that hot and sticky night. The Professor dreams of the destruction wrought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki while the Ballplayer recalls his father pushing him to hit homers as a child. When the Actress and the Professor first meet, she uses toys to explain her understanding of the theory of relativity, belying the dumb blonde image cultivated by her handlers. And, in a bizarre twist, Curtis, who once starred in a film with the real Monroe, now appears alongside her analog, further blurring the lines between '54 and '85.

Despite its ambition, Insignificance is a flawed masterpiece. The anachronistic score that accompanies the film, which ranges from Orbison to Mozart to music that sounds straight from Beverly Hills Cop, is jarringly out of place in some sections. All of the actors are likable, but Curtis, radiating that same pathetic charm he oozed in The Sweet Smell of Success, is clearly in a different class than his cast mates. Those quibbles aside, Insignificance still poses more philosophical questions than most movies made circa 1985.

As the film draws to its end, the Actress experiences a personal apocalypse (she miscarries after being punched in the gut by the Senator) and then asks the Professor what frightens him. In a chilling, extended sequence, the Professor sits in his hotel bed and imagines the room as a nuclear bomb goes off, windows exploding, the Actress catching fire and slowly melting down as blood pours from her incinerating form. In a fractured way, Roeg and Johnson may be saying that our daily dramas and the dramas of those whose lives we chose to follow are insignificant when we ignore the true threat of annihilation that looms overhead. Or maybe none of it is insignificant at all as the allure of celebrity and the limelight is just as intense and dazzling as an explosion just over the horizon.

by David Harris

Source: http://spectrumculture.com/2011/07/rediscover-insignificance.html

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