In Marjane Satrapi’s biopic Radioactive, which depicts Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike) making scientific discoveries with glamorously backlit hair, there’s a flash-forward to the bombing of Hiroshima that includes an all-time-bad visual pun. We are shown the interior of the Enola Gay, then the Little Boy bomb, then a little boy throwing a paper airplane on the ground. This is bad on its own, but it actually gets worse: The cap of the mushroom cloud dissolves perfectly into the outline of Curie’s hairdo as she sits in her lab, presumably worried about the future of science. Art this risible can make you roll your eyes at the idea of mass death on a historic scale.
There are other examples of questionable artistic intent in Radioactive, including additional egregious glimpses into the future and montages inspired by spiritualism and dance. The clichés are equally plentiful: terminal illness indicated by blood on a hankie, the cloying sight of an audience standing up and clapping slowly. The only consistent distraction from this corniness is the fact that the movie looks like an expensive commercial for perfume, in which Curie and her husband, Pierre (Sam Riley), are always found in romantic Paris backdrops and interiors. Is it Eau de Curie or Radium No. 5?
In fact, Satrapi, a graphic novelist turned director who is best known for her autobiographical animated film Persepolis, wants us to believe Curie’s life was really a love story. After an opening scene set in the 1930s, we flash back to the 1890s and the first chance meeting between Marie, who is then still known as Maria Skłodowska, and her fellow scientist Pierre. She is headstrong. He is patient. As it turns out, they are both interested in the phenomenon of radioactivity. This will lead them to spend a lot of time around radioactive elements and each other, resulting in romance, marriage, and lethal exposure to radiation. There are children, too, including Irène Curie, who like her parents, would go on to win the Nobel Prize. At one point, she abruptly turns into a young woman played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
It’s easy to imagine a stranger film (or one that lives up to Radioactive’s visual excesses) making something of these gothic proximities of romance and death and the bizarre circumstances of Pierre’s demise. But though the script, which was adapted from a book by Lauren Redniss, tells us nearly as much about Marie Curie’s sex life as her research, it mostly follows the template of lackluster science biopics along the lines of The Imitation Game, The Theory Of Everything, and The Current War. However, one must give credit where it’s due: The chemistry between Pike’s poise and Riley’s delightfully fuzzy John Hurt voice is enough to convince the viewer that they are watching a good movie, at least for roughly the first 20 minutes.
From there the troubles start, as the incoherent love story begins vying with the worst tropes of biographical drama. Most of us know, at best, two concrete things about Marie Curie: She won the Nobel Prize twice and died from the long-term effects of exposure to radiation. There is not much more to be gleaned from Radioactive. Chronologies are fudged. Events, motivations, and conflicts are invented out of whole cloth. In the interest of not wasting the reader’s time with nitpicking and fact checks, this writer will simply point out that Pierre Curie did not leave Marie behind to look after the kids while he went to Sweden to accept their shared Nobel Prize and that the life and career of Marie Curie does not, in fact, appear to have been entirely motivated by an extreme phobia of hospitals.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with playing fast and loose with history or just making stuff up. Plenty of great movies do. The problem with films like Radioactive is that they neither fulfill the biography’s basic duty of elucidating the life and times of the subject nor offer a compelling artistic vision or drama as a substitute for the hard facts. Satrapi strains to make the movie aesthetically interesting by deploying an intermittently Space Age score, color coding, and a sequence in which Marie imagines Pierre’s coffin being carried away by glowing, Loïe Fuller-inspired figures who look like haute couture interpretations of Halloween decor. But this high-end kitsch can’t cover up another conventionally dull biopic that begins with someone looking back on their entire life and ends with a very long slideshow of onscreen text.
82 Comments
A pity it wasn’t beta.
It sounds like this movie is no Curie for the pandemic summer blues.
“Oh, NO! Beta!”
But check out the gammas on Pike!
their papers are still radioactive & are stored in lead boxes with (needless to say) very, very limited access. personally, i’m also haunted by clarence dally who died horribly from radiation exposure cancer helping edison with x-rays & flouroscopes.
The women who worked for US radium always horrified me. That was messed up what happened to them
Read “The Only Harmless Great Thing” by Brooke Bolander. It’s a fictional story of the radium girls, Topsy the elephant, corporate exploitation, and reparations. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.
Aww, Topsy…!
“fossy jaw.” *shivers*
also remember the X-ray parties right after it was invented
It’s why I stick to investigating chocolate.
Those fools laughed at me when I presented the world my conclusive periodic table of chocolate elements! But who’s laughing now, Professor Brian Edwards of the School of Chemistry of the University of South Australia?! Who’s laughing now?!
There are some pretty knarly scenes of people suffering radiation sickness (including John Cusack, I believe) in Fat Man and Little Boy.
bleah.
I fail to see why Pike gets cast–where’s the acting talent?
I always knew they’d turn that song into a movie, so the culture has come to this
I thought most of the complaints about the Incurable Cough of Death was that it was a cheap way to add pathos to a story, but since Marie and her daughter and son-in-law really were killed by radiation poisoning I wouldn’t hold those bloody handkerchiefs against the film.
There are less overdone and cliche ways to do it though.
I guess the effects of radiation could have been shown by turning the Curie family into giant monsters who stomped on Parisian buildings.
Now this is the movie I want to see.
I for one am happy that the alternative blood-on-the-toilet-paper remains underused.
If ever there was a realistic scenario for ass weasels, this was it. Mutated tapeworms or something.
Maria’s mother died of tuberculosis. It’s the bloody handkerchief follows the family longer than Nobels.
Ew
Just once I want a movie where the ingenue tragically coughs into a bloody handkerchief…and it’s revealed that she just bit the inside of her cheek because she was laughing while eating in an earlier scene.
And yet, the one who coughs blood into a hankie is Pierre, who met his end after being run over by a horse-drawn cart.
If the bloody cough happened in the same scene as his death, that might actually be funny.
That’s fucking hilarious.
I admit, I was hoping this was slightly worse so IV could really shred it.It’s quite a shame that Pike can’t seem to find a winner here nor in A Private War. She was really excellent in that last one, and it was a decent movie, too, but nobody saw it…
I was shocked after that opening paragraph to scroll down and find a C-. The prose is way more vicious than the letter grade implies.
I’m trying to think of another actor who gave such an astonishing performance as she did in “Gone Girl” and who has so utterly failed to to land another project since that measured up to it. She actually reminds me a lot of Gene Tierney. Both played femme fatales for which they were Oscar nominated, and both had troubled careers subsequently albeit for very different reasons. Tierney had mental health struggles, while Pike really needs to fire her agent.
I’m holding out hope for The Wheel of Time series.She did have some good supporting roles prior to Gone Girl including Pride & Prejudice, Jack Reacher, and An Education.
Yes! She’s wonderful and warm in Pride & Prejudice, and delightfully vacant in An Education. Agree she hasn’t found much lately that lives up to her talent.
I’m thinking Bryan Cranston after BB. Or Christoph Waltz without Tarantino.
She is deeply underrated as a Bond Girl as well, because she got stuck in the shittiest Brosnan turn. She was really really good in it as opposed to…most everyone else.
Oh, god. The one with Madonna going through her “Why, no, I’ve never heard this place one calls ‘America’, and I am sure I have never been there in my life, for I am the Britishest woman to have ever Britished – would you like some tea? It is most certainly most different to coffee” phase.
The two things that worked for me in Die Another Day: The twist that Bond gets captured and disavowed at the end of the cold open, and Rosamund Pike in general.I remember getting genuinely angry with the movie when Halle Berry’s big quip when finally killing Pike’s character was “Read this…BITCH!”
Surfing into North Korea in the cold open at least set the tone for what was to come, and I respected that. It felt like a Roger Moore Bond movie and not a Brosnan one.Rosamund Pike did a whole lot with VERY little. She was great in it. Welp, now i gotta rewatch Die Another Day…thanks a lot AV Club.
She was certainly better than Dr. Chanukah
If you love Pike, you should definitely check out A Private War where she plays journalist Marie Colvin. Powerful film with a fantastic lead performance. She unquestionably should have been nominated for her second Oscar for that one.
Jeez, you are not kidding. I looked up her post-Gone Girl movies and none of them ring the faintest of bells, I am not certain they really exist.
It didn’t help that, after she broke big with her Oscar nom, a bunch of films were released that had obviously been made well before Gone Girl, but sat on the shelves and came out subsequently to cash in on her new marquee appeal. What she really needs is to land a good miniseries or something on HBO or Netflix or Hulu, instead of trying to get another shot at the Big Brass Ring by doing Oscar baiting biopics that fall short.
The thing with Pike is this is very much of a piece with her career, which is consistently being the best part of misbegotten failures. Gone Girl was weird entirely because she was in a good movie for once.
I’d second the comment that she’s good in Jack Reacher, though the character herself as written is kind of all over the place.
Pike herself may be responsible more than her agent—I could see choosing this Marie Curie movie and the one about the journalist with the eyepatch as dream projects, playing strong brave accomplished women. The problem is next to nobody wants to see these movies.
Man. We know Satrapi’s talented; maybe between this and The Voices she just isn’t cut out for film work?
I loved The Voices.
I mean that’s you I guess, it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever suffered through
Early in my career as a freelance story analyst I got to read The Voices for a potential production company. I was thoroughly annoyed by it and gave it a fairly scathing review. That has happened with a few scripts. Almost every time it’s this big, interesting concept that the text just fails to support.
It’s just baffling to me that anyone thought this was a good idea. The funny, misunderstood serial killer of women? Talking decapitated heads and funny animals alternating with grisly, graphic murder scenes? Who was this even made for?
At the time it struck me as insanely tone deaf edgelord “satire”. I think it’s meant to mock the MRA Nice Guy incel type of guy, the implication being that they are violent, mentally ill introverts who see themselves as misunderstood victims of outside forces. I think Ryan Reynolds being the star underscores my reading because he is 100% the kind of well-meaning dipshit who would think this “satire” is funny and effective when it is neither. The kind of guy who would benefit from seeing his perspective skewered isn’t generally open to introspection and audiences who might appreciate that toxic view being mocked are forced by the film to identify with that view.The tone this movie wants to take is incredibly difficult. I would argue that only a handful of attempts have been remotely successful. Texas Chainsaw Massacre II is one. *Maybe* Nothing But Trouble is another. (It’s equally reviled and praised for the “grindhouse horror/hijinks comedy” mix. I’m very fond of it, but I recognize that it’s kind of batshit and wonky.)
That mushroom-cloud-to-hair dissolve sounds like something that could maybe work — maybe — as a two-or-three panel dissolve/cut in a comic, but not on film.
Sounds like something that should absolutely have been in Dr. Strangelove.
There’s not a fight.And I’m not your captive.I’ll still probably turn this on Friday night.It’s Radioactive.
I would give you a star for every letter in “The Firm” if I could….
I’ll raise my flagDon my clothesWait for it on Cinemax, I suppose.
I’m wondering if this film has any other elements to it.
Well, there’s elements that turn into other elements.
What, throughout the film or periodically?
I think you’re fission for something deeper in this movie.
Maybe more than just pike.
“Pierre, it’s time to work! Up and ATOM”“Up and at them.”“No, Up and ATOM!”“Up and at them.”“No! Up, and ATOM!”“Up and AT THEM!”(Sighs) “Better.”
Well, I was hoping for something more glowing.
You’ve done it again Iggy, but let’s be frank. The biggest cliché here is this review’s title.
But the brilliance is that it works both ways. If it were good he could have said “it’s da bomb”
“Rosamund Pike absolutely glows in Radioactive”
I’d be inclined to agree if the movie didn’t actually use a slow clap, unironically.
It seems like the plot was just too heavy – perhaps if we bombarded it with neutrons, it would decay into two smaller and more stable movies.
There’s that word again, heavy…is something wrong with the Earth’s gravitational pull in the future?
At one point, she abruptly turns into a young woman played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
There is still much we don’t understand about radiation.
There was a secret unit experimenting with Taylor-Joy Particles at Los Alamos in the 1950’s – but it was ultimately shut down by the Department of Energy for the inherent dangers of the work.
In an alternate universe, Vignatiy Ishnevetsky writes a review of this movie, which ultimately wins the Palme d’Or and sweeps the Academy Awards, entitled “Radioactive is the bomb!”
She’s ugging herself up for the Oscars?
Radioactivity
Is in the air for you and me
Radioactivity
Discovered by Madame Curie
“We are shown the interior of the Enola Gay, then the Little Boy bomb, then a little boy throwing a paper airplane on the ground.” – the groan this just induced in me could level a mid-sized Japanese city.
The narrative problem is Marie died four years before the discovery of nuclear fission. She had no inkling that she had sowed the seeds for the possible destruction of the world. So that deprives the writer and viewer of the ‘twist ending’ of Marie realizing what she had wrought. If you want a Marie curie romance watch the 1943 Green Garson Walter Pigeon film ‘Madame Curie’.
Also if the movie is somehow pinning the blame of Marie for the misuses of radiation, it should also depict the many medical and energy-based uses that have been highly beneficial to humanity.
Before Marie Curie accepts a Nobel Prize, she thinks about her whole life
When did Rosamund Pike turn into Fionnula Flanagan?
S3Ep10 of Cosmos has a lovely animated short film of the life of Marie Curie that sound 10x better than this while being 10x better.