INSIGNIFICANCE (director: Nicolas Roeg; screenwriter: based on 1982 play byTerry Johnson; cinematographer: Peter Hannan; editor: Tony Lawson; cast: Theresa Russell (Marilyn Monroe), Tony Curtis (Sen. Joe McCarthy), Gary Busey (Joe DiMaggio), Michael Emil (Albert Einstein), Will Sampson (Indian Elevator Attendant), 1985)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A noble idea for a film to satire some of the best known American pop culture heroes of the 1950s, as directed by the Britisher Nicolas Roeg, from a Terry Johnson play conceived in 1982. In 1954, the filmmaker fantasizes, what would have happened if Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell), Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), and Senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis) met in a hotel room in New York City on one blistering hot day. The film often misses the target, but since it throws everything into the mix, it sometimes is delightfully on target, providing both amusement and thought-provoking reactions.
The fictionalized encounters, which try to capture the essence of the pop culture characters rather than depicting them as real-life characters, though using what knowledge the public has of them, the characterizations seem pretty close to the truth. It shows the icons concerned about the following topics: fame, vanity, communism vs. the free world, world peace, jealousy, Freud, love, The Theory of Relativity, the physical appearance of the universe, the A-bomb, hatred, and freedom of speech.
What really makes this film work, are the excellent performances by the stars. Michael Emil makes for a fine childlike genius, wearing a sweatshirt with the block letter P for Princeton emblazed on it. He sits in the hotel room late at night working on his Field Theory, when who should pop in, but Marilyn Monroe looking for an intelligent conversation with Einstein. She has just finished shooting her famous scene from The Seven Year Itch, where a wind gush under a NYC subway grating, blows her skirt up and one can see her panties. Marilyn is the life of the film, presenting a sexy and engaging sex goddess, who is both vulnerable and pushy.
The genius and the sexpot sit and talk about The Theory of Relativity, which Marilyn accurately explains by a demonstration of toys and a flashlight on the floor. She then says she learned it without understanding it. Einstein is upset by that, mentioning that knowledge isn't something that is true-- it's just an agreement made by people that makes it seem true. He says that real knowledge comes about by turning over possibilities, which is the method of thinking about things.
Gary Busey is the chain-smoking Yankee Clipper, who can't understand the starlet and her psychological problems that revolve around her insecurities and the hatred of her step-mother, but is jealously in love with her. He comes at 3 A.M. banging on the professor's hotel room door expecting his wife, who has not been with him for the last two weeks, of having another extra-marital affair. He is portrayed as a buffoon, self-absorbed with his fame and baseball achievements, with the running gag that he is someone who loves collecting bubble gum baseball cards of himself. Marilyn calls him stupid, complaining she never had an intelligent conversation with him. Somehow Emil, Busey, and Theresa survive the night, with Emil voluntarily leaving his room for another in the hotel to placate the jealous baseball slugger.
For my money, the best scene in the film was in the brief contact between Will Samson, as the proud Cherokee elevator attendant, taking Einstein to a room on a different floor. When Einstein tells him that the Indians believe that wherever they stand is the center of the universe and Samson responds that he just eats hot dogs and goes up and down all day in the elevator, an interesting conversation ensues from that, with the Indian suggesting that Einstein is really a Cherokee because of his views.
The most terrifying carrier of world gloom, is Tony Curtis, as the witch-hunting junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who is in Einstein's room to subpoena him to testify before his House of Un-American Committee. He is shown as a repressed Catholic, a hypocrite, a boozer, an anti-Semite, a paranoid nutcase who is hell-bent through his powers in the senate to head a committee that sniffs out people he doesn't feel comfortable about by naming them as commies and thereby ruining their careers. Einstein says he will go to his World Peace conference and will not testify before the senator's committeee, which challenges the senator's authority.
The film is a bit of a mess, with no certain plot and it seems to have no particular aim it hopes to accomplish. But as a diverting look at these fantasies of the four 1950 icons, it makes for provocative theater and in the process, it sometimes offers us some inspired thoughts to think about. It sort of sucks you along for its ride and you don't mind going along because its kind of fun to imagine how those characters really were. The film's efforts might be comparable to a guy fantasizing how it would be to sleep with Marilyn Monroe.
REVIEWED ON 5/19/2000 GRADE: B-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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