Pike’s energy brings (half-)life to Marie Curie biopic
Iranian director Marjane Satrapi, who was Oscar-nominated 13 years ago for turning her graphic novel Persepolis into a beautiful animated film, is back with another adaptation of a graphic novel. This time, however, Satrapi adapts Lauren Redniss’s 2010 National Book Award nominee Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout not as an animated picture, but as a live-action drama, and the results don’t work nearly as well as Satrapi’s first big success. Radioactive tells the story of famed Polish-French scientist Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike) and her personal and professional triumphs and travails. Unfortunately, Satrapi’s new work yields a very mediocre film about a great woman who deserves a more dignified biopic than this facile, sentimental treatment.
A huge part of the picture’s problem is the script by British writer Jack Thorne (The Aeronauts). Cliche-ridden and scattered, the screenplay often feels like a zealous first draft. Filled with flash-backs, flash-forwards and cringe-inducing dialogue, Thorne’s script tries to be original, but mostly feels clunky and overwrought. Curie indeed had a remarkable life, and Radioactive covers all its touchstones. Maria Sklodowska arrives from Poland in the late 19th century to study in Paris (“I’ve come all the way from Poland to study science!” she says earnestly to her future husband and fellow scientist Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), in an example of one of Thorne’s more obvious lines), and battles sexism to become Marie Curie, discoverer of radium and polonium and a two-time Nobel Prize winner. Along the way, she suffers debilitating grief after the tragic accidental death of her husband, raises two children as a widowed mother, and faces personal scandal that would break a lesser woman.
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All these life events are inherently interesting, but between Thorne’s unwieldy script and Satrapi’s often ill-conceived direction, the story’s engrossing elements get lost in the shuffle. Take the scene in which Marie and Pierre honeymoon; Satrapi and Thorne decide that showing us the esteemed couple of science frolicking naked in a sun-dappled pool of water is somehow a good idea, and not cheesy and embarrassing. Similarly, the filmmakers’ most ill-advised choice is to use a framing device of flash-forwards to hammer home a point about the complicated legacy of the Curies’ work. The picture jumps ahead several times to show us the effects of radiation both good (in 1957, a young boy receives new radiation therapy to cure his cancer!) and bad (“Mankind will desire more good than harm from these new discoveries,” Marie declares at one point. And then we flash-forward to the Enola Gay dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Um, maybe not). We also get scenes of atomic bomb testing in Nevada in 1961, and the 1986 Chernobyl accident. This already heavy-handed thematic underlining is further exacerbated by Thorne’s script, which has Pierre telling Marie, “There are things to be scared of, but there is much to be celebrated,” and Marie responding, “I hope you’re right… I hope you’re right.” Ooooh…. Much for us to ponder! Satrapi adds in a fair share of dreamy, gauzy visions, too, just in case we miss the point. Marie dreams of everything from her dead mother (a throughline as to why Marie hates hospitals is also overkill) to tenderly kissing a Chernobyl victim.
While Satrapi and Thorne have made some missteps, their cast is far better than the material they’ve been given, and they at least do well with it. Pike is especially strong, delivering Thorne’s prosaic lines with a conviction and passion they probably don’t deserve. Pike and Riley share the best scene in the movie, an argument that takes place after Pierre returns from accepting their shared Nobel Prize, a trip Marie has to miss due to giving birth. “It just happens my mind is finer,” she snaps at him, and we realize she is voicing the frustrations felt by so many women in male-dominated professions who have been made to feel small by their male colleagues. Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) and Aneurin Barnard also do nice work in their respective roles as the Curies’ daughter Irene and as Paul, Pierre’s colleague and Marie’s later lover.
As a side note, Satrapi’s picture is actually the second Marie Curie biopic to come out recently. Three years ago, a Polish/German/French collaboration played a few American film festivals, but didn’t receive much wide distribution in the States. That’s too bad, because Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge is the stronger picture, with far fewer flaws than Satrapi’s effort.
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Radioactive is available today on Amazon Prime.
