INSIGNIFICANCE Movie Review

Better than it sounds. Terry Johnson's screenplay (based on his play) is a kind of compressed Ragtime, in which a number of his torical figures cross paths—and more—on one 1954 summer night. Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell) is the warm and life-giving sun around whom Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis), and Albert Einstein (Michael Emil) find themselves in orbit, all within the universe of a single New York hotel room (the celebs are clearly the aforementioned persons, though the film never uses their names). What could easily have been a slamming door, French style farce instead turns into a gently charming, tantalizing game of what if, with insights and agendas blending into satisfying, civilized, and ultimately liberating collision of ideas. The too-often underrated Theresa Russell does a glorious job with Marilyn; a lesser director than Nicolas Roeg might have urged Russell to camp her up mercilessly, but instead Marilyn's intuitive wit and intelligence aren't shown to be incongruous characteristics in order to get a startled, easy laugh from the audience. Curtis plays McCarthy as if he'd been cross-bred with Roy Cohn; it's a neat bit of shorthand, and it works fine. Emil is a gentle wonder; you fully understand his attraction to Marilyn, and you hope down in your heart of hearts that the real Einstein was exactly like him.

NEXT STOP… Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Time After Time (1979)

1985 110m/C GB Gary Busey, Tony Curtis, Theresa Russell, Michael Emil, Will Sampson; D: Nicolas Roeg; W: Terry Johnson; C: Peter Hannan; M: Hans Zimmer.VHS, LV ORI, WAR