Radioactive (2019)
Review of Radioactive (2019), directed by Marjane Satrapi
Lately, I’ve been accidentally on a Rosamund Pike kick. I first watched her awhile back in I Care a Lot and fell absolutely in love with her character in that, despite her being a conwoman.
I then watched Gone Girl when my sister let me share her Hulu and then realized Pike was just really good at playing women who were cunning and conniving. And then, one lonely Tuesday night, I logged onto Amazon Prime Video and randomly selected this movie. Turns out Pike was in it and she was playing Marie Curie, so I became interested as the opening scenes rolled, and then Anya Taylor-Joy showed up and I was even more interested.
Marie Curie has always been a figure that I’ve looked up to. I was born in 2000, and when my family ended up getting a desktop computer when I was about seven years old, my favorite activity was to read historical articles on Wikipedia.
I was absolutely enamored with the women I’d read about; I had Marie Antoinette’s entire timeline memorized by the time I was ten years old. Marie Curie was one of the women I read about, and while I was terrible at science because I am unable to read numbers properly, for the longest time I wanted to be the next Marie Curie.
Anyways, onwards with the review! I don’t want to ramble too long.
Radioactive tracks the explosive life and research of Marie Curie and her husband.
I feel that it is appropriate to say that this film kind of feels like a girl boss film, just set in the context of Marie Curie’s life. Produced and released in the era of major feminist moments in the film and entertainment industry, and all over the world, it seems fitting that a film where we see the discrimination that Curie faced as a woman in science in the early 1900s.
We begin in Curie’s dying moments as Pike, laying in a gurney with clearly fake white hair, begins to recall her life’s story. Born in Poland, Curie came to Paris to study in the 1890s and found that she was being actively discriminated against because of her gender. The story in the film, however, tends to focus on her relationship with her husband, Pierre Curie. We see a whirlwind romance, something to distract us from the monotony of Curie’s life in the laboratory. And then we’re back in the lab as the two of them discover two new elements: polonium and radium.
The film then glosses over the impacts of this discovery on the science and medical world until the final act. But during this point in time, we see witty remarks in a newspaper read-aloud about what people are doing with these elements. We’re also seeing very clearly the lack of understanding they had during this time about how dangerous these elements were. The Curies, particularly Marie, tend to hold vials of the neon green element in their hands, even putting it in their pockets.
We also see one very specific use of radium: for seances. Pierre tries to take Marie to a seance where people have begun using radium to try and connect to the afterlife and realm of the spirits, but Marie discourages this notion. She’s not very religious in this aspect, especially after the death of her mother in their homeland. However, this changes after Pierre’s death.
Pierre dies after his anemia, fueled by their research, leads him to trip in front of a carriage. He is quite literally smashed to death underneath the carriage, which is quite horrifying to watch on screen. In reality, Pierre was said to be absent-minded, lost in his thoughts, and slipped on a rainy day underneath the carriage. Regardless of the authenticity of this scene, it affected Marie Curie greatly, she has an affair with one of her coworkers, and the French press comes for her and singles her out because she’s a woman and Polish.
The final arc of this movie is during WWI, where her children have suddenly grown up (the passing of time in these scenes is done in a mediocre manner) and Irene Curie, her daughter, urges Marie to use radioactivity in order to help wounded soldiers with X-rays. This is a major pivot compared to the previous sections of the movie, which honestly feels quite disjointed because of the jarring time jumps. It’s like they tried to cram everything in within a certain time length, which fails miserably.
A key part in this is Marie’s understanding in how dangerous her discovery has become, but also how it can help me. We see this juxtaposed with images of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a test, and Chernobyl, but her moment of redemption with radium is with the X-rays.
The movie clearly points to radium as a slow-killer, as it killed her husband via the anemia, Marie Curie through acute radiation syndrome, and, while this isn’t seen in the film, Irene’s own death. Curie rejects Irene’s declaration to be involved because she knows how dangerous it is in the long run, how it will eventually end up killing her daughter. And it did.
I think it’s just hard to make a movie about a scientist like Curie and make it interesting, which is why this movie comes across as very fragmented. We can’t see too many of the scenes of calculating the math and mixing things because the average viewer isn’t going to want to see it.
The inciting incidents are Pierre’s death, the discrimination she faced as a woman and a Pole, and the war. Are they compelling incidents? Not really. They’re too quiet, too small in scale for this woman’s life, to truly be exciting on the big screen. And things are majorly dramatized for a biopic about a spectacular woman—the random sex and nudity were simply unnecessary. I’m not a prude or conservative about these things, but I simply saw little value in including it.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a decent tribute. Does it make it a good movie? Not really. The actors did a good job with the script they were given, but I think the problem is that this movie tried to do too much and skewered history in a way that some may find controversial.
Personally, I would’ve preferred a piece that didn’t incorporate much of the romance and thus focused on Curie outside of the fact she had a husband, although they worked together. He died young, which was truly tragic. But it’s almost as if it’s set up that she didn’t become someone until she met her husband, when, in fact, she was such a brilliant woman from Poland who earned her awards.
