The Cinematheque

The outer reaches of Nicolas Roeg’s cinematic cosmos are arrived at in Insignificance, the director’s deliriously metaphysical screen adaptation of Terry Johnson’s satirical play. A kaleidoscopic rumination on fame, history, Hiroshima, and the laws of the universe, this cosmic comedy revolves around four unnamed celebrities—but really, Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), and Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis)—who converge in a Manhattan hotel room circa 1954. As Roeg is wont to do, space and time are detonated in a fireworks display of radical, parallel editing that smashes past, present, and future tenses together. (The film’s countdown to nuclear annihilation adds extra oomph to this device.) Though each in the ensembles shines, it is Roeg’s then-wife Russell, as a breathy, Seven Year Itch-aping Monroe, who absolutely radiates. The film’s abstract, apocalyptic ending joins Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point in the pantheon of visually audacious closers.

Print courtesy of Harvard Film Archive