An Important Night of ‘Insignificance’One night sometime...

An Important Night of ‘Insignificance’

One night sometime in the 1950s, an improbable meeting of the world’s greatest scientist, a sex-symbol, a baseball player and a well-known, red-baiting U.S. senator takes place in a New York hotel room.

“Insignificance,” a bittersweet fictional drama released in 1985, follows the famous four during a single night in which their lives become intertwined through a weird mix of sex and love, anger and fear, compassion and hope.

The cast includes Theresa Russell as the movie star-sex symbol, Gary Busey as the ball player and jealous husband, and Michael Emil as the frizzy-haired professor with a likable nonchalance. Tony Curtis is wonderfully unlikable as the sweaty, bullying senator.

On the eve of a congressional hearing to ferret out Communist Party members, the senator arrives at the professor’s room and alternately cajoles and threatens him to name names. The senator sees conspiracies everywhere and at one point suggests that World War II was a Soviet Communist plot, even though the professor points out that 15 million Soviets died in the war.

Meanwhile the movie star, lamenting having spent the last few hours standing over a sidewalk grating having her skirt blown around her ears, heads to the hotel on a whim to meet the man who proposed the theory of relativity. Her husband, irritated at seeing men ogle various pin-up and screen images of his wife, follows her to the hotel believing she is having an affair.

In the room, a whirlwind of emotions and threats drives the characters together--and then apart forever when the night ends.

Frequent flashbacks and flash forwards are disorienting at times, but the professor’s fantasy scenes depicting a nuclear holocaust are compelling.

“Insignificance” (1985), directed by Nicholas Roeg. 110 minutes. Rated R.