Insignificance (1985)

Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance was released in 1985 and it has plenty of the Roeg trademarks.

Roeg’s 1980s movies did not achieve the mainstream commercial success that Don’t Look Now had enjoyed but I don’t think it ever occurred to Roeg to compromise. He just kept making Nic Roeg movies and Insignificance is a very very Nic Roeg movie.

In general I dislike movies about real historical figures but in this case the bizarre juxtaposition of people who in real life never met means that you’re not really going to be tempted to assume that there’s any intention to offer realistic portrayals of events in the lives of these people. And the characters are not given actual names in the film.

The basic premise is that The Senator (obviously based on Senator Joe McCarthy) is trying to force The Professor (clearly supposed to be Albert Einstein) to testify at a hearing. In reality the paths of McCarthy and Einstein never crossed. Meanwhile The Actress (obviously Marilyn Monroe) has talked her way into The Professor’s hotel room because she wants to explain the Special Theory of Relativity to him. Marilyn Monroe and Einstein never met in real life. Then The Ballplayer (based on Monroe’s real-life husband Joe DiMaggio) shows up. In reality he never met Einstein.

The Professor of course already knows how the Special Theory of Relativity works but it’s important to The Actress to demonstrate that she understands it as well.

The Professor tells The Senator that he won’t testify.

The Ballplayer is just trying to save his marriage to The Actress.

And the Actress has decided that she’d very much like to sleep with The Professor. Having thought about it The Professor decides that it’s an idea that has much to recommend it.

I don’t think the parts of the movie dealing with The Senator work all that well. They seem out of place and they seem like a misguided attempt to inject a political subtext.

But the scenes between The Professor, The Ballplayer and the Actress work extremely well. They’re all trying to figure something out. The Professor is trying to describe the shape of the universe mathematically. The Ballplayer is trying to figure out how to regain his wife’s love. The Actress is trying to work out why neither her marriage nor her career have made her happy.

Tony Curtis is OK as The Senator and Michael Emil is reasonably good as The Professor. Gary Busey is excellent. He does something here that he did extremely well in other movies (notably Carny) - take a character who could easily have been pathetic and give him dignity and substance and make the audience care about him.

Theresa Russell is great. She’s in full flight here. The two directors who really knew how to get great performances from her were Ken Russell (in Crimes of Passion) and Nic Roeg.

It’s a Nic Roeg movie so of course there’s an obsession with time and some narrative games. Roeg also loved intercutting sex scenes with other scenes and in this case he intercuts two different sex scenes with a scene of The Ballplayer in a bar.

Asking exactly what it all means is a bit pointless. If you can describe what a movie is about in words there’d be no need to make the movie. There’s stuff about time and death and the A-bomb and fame and sex and love. And this is absurdist comedy. If you can explain an absurdist comedy then it has failed.

The Actress is able to explain how Special Relativity works but she admits that she doesn’t understand why it works. The Professor knows what the shape of the universe is but it cannot be described. He has spent years trying to develop a unified theory, without success (just as Einstein spent years trying to unify quantum mechanics and relativity without success).

Maybe that’s the key to the movie. All the characters are looking for answers but maybe there aren’t any, or maybe we could never understand the answers if we knew them. The Professor will never complete his unified theory. Maybe The Ballplayer finds out that trying to understand a woman is like trying to grasp the shape of the universe. The answers will just keep slipping away. Maybe the Actress will discover that trying to understand love is also like trying to grasp the shape of the universe. Once again, those answers just keep slipping away.

And perhaps the movie suggests that time is like that. We think we have a handle on it, but we don’t. Roeg uses flashbacks and flash forwards. There’s a calendar image of the actress fragmented into tiny pieces and the movie is a bit like that. Needless to say the movie’s ending does not wrap everything up in a tidy fashion.

The problem is that the flashbacks and flash forwards are too obvious. We’re not surprised by them. It’s as if Roeg felt obliged to live up to his reputation for doing such things but they’re not really necessary. They’re rather trite and they trivialise the characters. It’s interesting that in his next movie, Castaway, Roeg abandoned such tricks altogether and was content to rely on the acting skills of Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe to let us know what was going on with their characters. In Insignificance Theresa Russell, Gary Busey and Michael Emil were perfectly capable of doing that as well.

The one really visually inspired scene is The Actress demonstrating Special Relativity to The Professor with children’s toys.

I don’t think this is quite in the top rank of Nicolas Roeg moveis but even a lesser Roeg film is pretty interesting and Insignificance is eccentric enough to be highly recommended.