Butler's Cinema Scene

Rosamund Pike as Madame Curie

“RADIOACTIVE” My rating: B (Amazon Prime)

109 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Not content with the limitations of a conventional biopic, Marjane Satrapi’s film about Marie Curie blows up the form, not just depicting the life of a great scientist but exploring what over the decades her discoveries have meant to the world.

As suggested by the piece’s unconventional title — “Radioactive” — the fallout (pun intended) of Curie’s groundbreaking work is not entirely life-affirming.

Satrapi,  who first came to fame with her graphic novel Persepolis (about growing up in and then fleeing post-revolutionary Iran) and the 2007 animated feature based on it, has a lot of her mind here.  Perhaps too much for tidy presentation.

Happily she has as her lead Rosamund Pike,  whose work in recent years — especially “Gone Girl” and “A Private War” — has catapulted her into the first ranks of film actresses. Even when “Radioactive” threatens to fly out of control, Pike keeps things centered.

Beginning late in the 19th century and extending past Curie’s death in 1934 (poisoned by all the radioactive material she had handled over a lifetime), the film hits the usual biographical landmarks: Marie’s meeting and marriage to fellow physicist Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), her discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the death of Pierre and her years as a widow still devoted to scientific research. During World War I she traversed the front in a truck outfitted with primitive X-ray equipment that allowed military doctors to locate the bullets and shrapnel in the bodies of wounded soldiers.

But Jack Thorne’s screenplay (based on Lauren Redniss’ graphic novel Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout) also leans heavily  on the feminist aspects of Curie’s story, especially her fights with a chauvinistic scientific establishment (embodied by Simon Russell Beale’s university bigwig) and her resentment of Pierre, who accepted their Nobel Prize while Marie stayed at home with the kids (“You stole my brilliance and made it your own”).

The film devotes considerable time to one of the more controversial parts of Curie’s story, her post-Pierre affair with a married co-worker (Aneurin Barnard). The relationship created an uproar: this Polish “harlot” was besmirching the sacred institution of French marriage.  (I know, I know…the French have a long history of besmirching marriage.)  Don’t recall that incident even being mentioned in the sanitized 1943 Greer Garson version of the yarn.

Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley

“Radioactive” really goes out on a limb, though, when it steps away from Marie’s story and looks to the future.  In a series of elaborately staged vignettes we witnessed the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, a young boy in the 1950s undergoing live-saving radiation therapy,  nuclear bomb tests in the Nevada desert destroying a “fake” suburban town, and the disastrous 1986 explosion in the Soviet nuclear power plant in Chernobyl.

Without saying it in so many words, the film asks whether the plusses of Curie’s research outweigh the minuses. (Kind of a moot point…if Curie hadn’t discovered these radioactive wonders, some other scientist eventually would have.)

In yet another departure from biographical norms, the film incorporates animated sequences to explain the scientific principles the Curies explored.

Holding it all together is Pike, whose Marie is tough-minded individual who refuses to be held back either by her sex or by her nationality (she was Polish).

She has little patience with the niceties of everyday bourgeoise life, telling the mother of a squalling baby “Shouldn’t you assume some sort of motherly deposition?” and laying down the law when Pierre suggests a personal and professional relationship  (“I won’t be your mistress and I can’t tolerate meddling”).

For all that, she’s still human.  The film’s acting highlight comes when the normally combative Marie totally loses it over the body of her husband (killed in a carriage accident but already suffering from a fatal case of radiation poisoning).

Throughout the film we are reminded that Marie carried with her a glowing green vial of luminescent material.  A postscript informs us that her papers are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead vaults and may be perused only by scholars who have donned hazmat suits.

| Robert W. Butler