Mark Reviews Movies: RADIOACTIVE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 23, 2020

From the start, Radioactive presents itself as an obvious, fairly clichéd recounting of the life of Marie Curie, the famous and still well-known scientist who, with her husband, more or less established the study of radioactivity. Jack Thorne's screenplay doesn't have an auspicious beginning, as an older Marie (Rosamund Pike) collapses in a laboratory, is brought to a hospital, and has her life flash in front of her. This is not the way for filmmakers to establish that they're going to do anything different or even slightly intriguing with a biographical narrative.

Director Marjane Satrapi, though, clearly does want to do something distinctive with this material, and at times, so, too, does Thorne, who has adapted Lauren Redniss' book Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout. Satrapi brings a sometimes bold visual style to complement the period-accurate backdrops and sets of late 19th century and early 20th century Paris. As for the screenplay, it possesses a most ingenious conceit, in which the lengthy flashback of Curie's life is occasionally interrupted by brief scenes from a future she would never know.

One could look at these moments as an assertion of the scientist's genius—an act of foresight about what her discoveries would bring to the world (In reality, neither of the Curies realized just how dangerous their work was). It's simpler and more profound than that, though. The movie—which otherwise presents Marie's diligent and nearly obsessive work, as well as her fraught personal life, in a straightforward manner—makes an effort to offer a reckoning of the Curies' breakthroughs.

Most of the presentation of this story, though, isn't as thoughtful or unique. After the introductory gimmick, Marie's career as a scientist, beginning a few years after arriving in Paris from her native Poland in the 1890s, unfolds in often clunky and plainly expository fashion. She's looked down upon by the administration of the University of Paris, and Marie's stubbornness, presented as her defining feature for good and for ill, quickly leads her to search for another lab.

She meets her soon-to-be husband Pierre (Sam Riley), a fellow scientist, in a pair of intentionally awkward but unintentionally contrived scenes. Quickly, they start working together, and almost as quickly (because there's a good amount of life to get through in this story), Pierre proposes marriage.

Along the way, the couple's research—explained to the audience by way of a character who doesn't understand it (a transparent narrative device) and also shown by way of some almost surreal images of elements being broken down to the atomic level (a more helpful and striking approach)—succeeds (leading to one of many on-the-nose pronouncements: "I call it 'radioactivity'").

They discover two new elements—radium and polonium—and become the toast of the global scientific community. Assorted tensions, such as Marie feeling overshadowed by her husband (At first, the couple's Nobel Prize is solely awarded to him), arise, and various setbacks, such as Pierre's sudden death and the rise of nationalism (not to mention a highly publicized affair) turning Marie into a pariah, occur.

Throughout all of this and the rest of the telling of Marie's life story, there's the sense of a movie at odds with itself. Thorne is busy explaining, resulting in some truly clumsy dialogue, whether it be characters changing the conversation (or bringing up topics for no discernible reason) or iterating points that already have been made (Marie refuses to enter a hospital, which she constantly explains every time she's near one).

Meanwhile, Satrapi would rather use visuals to cement or highlight ideas about these characters and their work. There is, for example, that animated scene showing the process of getting to the core of an element, but there's also the way in which radium, kept by Marie in a glass vial, illuminates the character's face and surroundings in a greenish blue glow. It has overtaken, defined, and, without her knowing it, destroyed Marie's life. Still, she lies in bed, holding the radioactive sample as a doting mother would cradle a child (an apparent fact about the real Curie, as well as stark juxtaposition to the way Marie keeps physical and emotional distance from her real children).

The screenplay and the filmmaking do come together, though, in those scenes from the future of this story. We see a young boy, preparing to undergo radiation treatment when there are only five such machines in the entire world. We observe the crew members of the Enola Gay approaching their target, as life in Hiroshima goes on unaware of the devastation about to arrive in a literal flash. People gather in the desert to watch a hydrogen bomb test (mirroring how radium becomes a trend in Marie's own time), and while Marie goes through some personal issues on the street, an anachronistic fire truck drives by—its ultimate destination the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl.

How, then, do we calculate the Curies' work in terms of the help and death that eventually resulted from it? Thorne has a simplistic answer (offered by Marie in the afterlife), but under Satrapi's more nuanced guidance, it doesn't seem as simple. That's the real battle of Radioactive—not between differing ideas about its subject, but between opposing ideas about how that subject's story should be presented.

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