MOVIE REVIEW : ‘INSIGNIFICANCE’: A NIGHT OF ICONS

“Insignificance” (Friday at Cineplex), an intelligent, satiric comedy, brings together four ‘50s icons on a single sweltering night in Manhattan, with haunting reverberations.

No matter if the film never names them, the white-blonde movie star (Theresa Russell) filming on a street grating, her skirts blowing up around her ears, is the personification of Marilyn Monroe; her increasingly irate husband (Gary Busey) is a legendary ballplayer suspiciously like Joe DiMaggio; the barefooted Princeton scientist (Michael Emil) is Albert Einstein and the sweaty senator (Tony Curtis) threatening him with subpoena is Joseph McCarthy.

Director Nicolas Roeg has taken English playwright Terry Johnson’s irreverently inventive play, set in 1954, and given it additional layers--flashes of memory and awful prescience. The result is absorbing, peculiar, richly comic and oddly touching. Not all of “Insignificance” works, but at its most electric it is cautionary book, chapter and verse on the toll that fame and/or celebrity can exact.

Two of its characters, Monroe and Einstein, are at a crisis point: the professor with the implications of his work and the actress with twin terrors, the erosion of her second marriage and her life as a commodity.

After shimmying on her subway grating into the small hours, the actress, on a whim, turns up at the scientist’s door to prove the Theory of Relativity or, more to the point, to prove she understands it. (The meeting isn’t all that surreal--Einstein and Monroe did once meet and were reportedly charmed by each other.) After a dazzling demonstration, as grounded in fact as it is long on ingenuity, she demands that he reply in kind: “Now you have to show me your legs.”

If things progress a little further, well, who can blame an insular professor in his 70s who discovers that this world phenomenon--of whom he’d never heard--had once put him third on her list of men she’d like to sleep with? (When she found out his age, she moved him up to first.)

Into this delicate situation bursts the DiMaggio character, something of an old hand at celebrity himself. Since his marriage, he has also become knowledgeable about psychiatrists, gynecologists and the art of persuasive conversation through bolted doors.

The film’s most tender moments come from this hulking, noisy athlete--his loving, frustrated understanding of the impasse they’ve reached and his shrewd analysis of his wife’s needs, to have “a thousand people touching her all the time and . . . to be alone all the time also.” Most poignant of all is the pain that underlies Busey’s flat-voiced description of her inability to have anything but miscarriages.

Although he is the furthest physically from his character, Busey has both the greatest range and the most authority of this sensitive quartet. Russell, never less than brave, is puzzling: Within a single scene she can vary from inspired to abysmal, and back again. (Physically she’s delectable, but it’s Gloria Grahame she’s a dead ringer for, not Monroe.)

As the impotent, vengeful senator, unfortunately the least well drawn of all the characters, Tony Curtis has the same sneering energy he had in “Sweet Smell of Success,” and no higher praise exists. And to his credit, Michael Emil resists playing Einstein as a cunning guru; instead, he portrays his character’s enormous faculties as both a gift and a burden.

In addition to Roeg, never less than a challenging film maker, “Insignificance’s” risk-taking producers, Jeremy Thomas and executive producer Alexander Stuart, should also be singled out. The production details are extraordinary, from the fragmented David Hockney pinup of Theresa Russell, which captures precisely her (not Monroe’s) seductiveness, to the shimmering holocaust at the film’s end, as mysterious as it is deadly beautiful.

‘INSIGNIFICANCE’ An Island Alive release of a Zenith Production in association with the Recorded Picture Co. Producer Jeremy Thomas. Executive producer Alexander Stuart. Director Nicolas Roeg. Screenplay Terry Johnson. Camera Peter Hannan. Production design David Brockhurst. Costumes Shuna Harwood. Editor Tony Lawson. Sound mixer Paul Le Mare. With Gary Busey, Tony Curtis, Michael Emil, Theresa Russell, Will Sampson.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (adult themes).