Mark Reviews Movies: RADIUM GIRLS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 22, 2020

Radium Girls tries to inspire, framing a 1920s legal battle for compensation and change, against a company that knowingly poisoned its employees, as a victory in the history of workers' rights. To a degree, that's honest, but the cost seems far too high for the seemingly minimal win. Via some text, we're told at the end of the movie that the luminous radium-based paint, which devastated the lives and bodies of the eponymous group and many others, continued to be used until the 1970s. One really wonders what victory was actually achieved.

There's an inherent horror to this story, based on a true one (The names of people and the company have been changed for no apparent reason—except, perhaps, to avoid connection to a recently bestselling book with a similar title). The filmmakers never quite grasp it. There are scenes, certainly, of the physical devastation wrought by the radioactive paint—faces bruised from swelling and enveloped in a rash, a bloodied tooth sitting on the edge of a bathtub, and the woman who lost that tooth seeming to pull out another one, only to reveal that it's a piece of her jaw. There's much more horror to this story, though, beyond such gruesome sights.

Screenwriters Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw touch upon them. The company, called American Radium in the movie, knows the dangers of their paint, called "Undark" in the story and reality, from the beginning. They still convince these employees that it's entirely safe.

The workers, mostly young women and teenage girls, paint the faces of watches, making a single cent for every one completed. Making matters all the worse, the women are encouraged to lick the paint on the brush in order to speed up the process. The worker with the most watches finished at the end of a set cycle is given a reward: a bottle of radium-infused water, which is said to have incredible healing properties.

Here's the sad kicker: These women and the local community of Orange, New Jersey, want these jobs and this factory, even after it becomes a near-scientific certainty that the paint is slowly, grotesquely killing people. The horror here is definitely in the effects of the paint on the employees, but it's also—and not communicated as well here—in these twisted mindsets: that the lives of human beings are just part of the price of running a successful business and that a steady job is worth the risk or certainty of one's own death on account of the work.

Directors Lydia Dean Pilcher and Mohler clearly understand this, but they're too busy simplifying matters for us to really feel that sense of helplessness. Their dramatized story revolves around two sisters, Bessie (Joey King) and Josephine (Abby Quinn), who work at the Orange factory.

Bessie dreams of becoming a movie star, and Josephine just wants to keep the family—now, after the deaths of an elder sister (who painted watches) and the women's parents, only the sisters and their grandfather (played by Joe Grifasi)—financially afloat. Josephine becomes ill, with the company doctor (played by Neal Huff) falsely diagnosing her with syphilis.

Bessie, learning of the dangers of the paint by way of her late sister's diary and having a rather blunt political awakening by way of a local Communist group ("I love a party," she naively says, when asked if she wants to attend a Party meeting), decides to fight American Radium in court. They assemble a legal team, start investigating the likes of Undark inventor Mr. Leech (Scott Shepherd), and take the findings to the courthouse and the court of public opinion.

The resulting story moves between the personal (The sisters join with other current and former employees, who have their own medical and financial troubles), the legal (Assorted courtroom scenes offer some drama, such as damning testimony a witness lying on the stand, with a murmuring crowd telling us how we should react), and the political (Bessie discovers there's a lot wrong in the United States at the time, and the filmmakers clearly want us to connect that with the present day) with some ambition. Because all of these elements are so simplified (The dialogue is awkwardly direct, and some elements, like the company's hired goons intimidating Bessie, add unnecessary conflict, instead of diving deeper into the actual conflicts here), they're presented with an unconvincingly optimistic view.

Pilcher and Mohler want us to be inspired here—by Bessie's discovery that there's more to life to her own dreams and ambitions, by women standing together against people (mostly men) who dismiss their worth, by a wronged group holding the wrongdoers to some account, by the vaguely defined changes to work conditions that ultimately resulted from this case. Radium Girls isn't dishonest in taking this approach, but it's definitely disheartening—like finding out that a company more or less agreed that radioactive paint was deadly but kept using it for another 50 years.

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