ReelBob: ‘Radioactive’ ★★½
By Bob Bloom
“Radioactive,” which debuted July 24 on Amazon Prime, is a biopic flaying for a singular premise.
Instead, the movie, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie, splits its subject into so many particles that she nearly fails to appear as a whole.
Director Marjane Satrapi, working from a script by Jack Thorne and based on a book by Lauren Redniss, conceive storytelling approaches that are counterproductive and remove the spotlight from Curie and the discoveries made by her and her husband, Pierre.
The movie, while extolling the benefits or radium and radioactivity, showing how it helps fight cancer, also goes to the extreme of displaying its dangers and destructive properties such as the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 on Hiroshima and the nuclear accident in 1986 at Chernobyl.
“Radioactive” is at its best when it covers the collaborative partnership between the Curies as well as Marie Curie’s single-mindedness, obstinance and arrogance.
Marie Curie is brilliant — and she knows it. She also refuses to compromise on any scientific issue, a quality that endears her to Pierre (Sam Riley) when she reluctantly accepts his offer of laboratory space.
Marie does not want to be indebted to anyone, yet Pierre’s quiet persistence and recognition of her genius, wears her down to the point that Marie realizes she loves him and will marry him.
Their experimentation seeking the mystery element that they later name radium is interesting, if a bit rushed.
The film falls back on the cliché of using montage to cover their various efforts to prove their theories.
Of course, since the majority of movie’s timeframe is set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we also are treated to the usual display of old graybeards in the scientific community scoffing at Marie Curie because of her gender.
Satrapi covers Marie Curie’s life in flashbacks and proceeds to then use flashbacks within flashbacks, then jumping around to events years after her death in 1934 to show how radium — and radioactivity — has changed the world.
I would have preferred seeing more of the Curies working and arguing than getting a basic history lesson on already-familiar topics.
Pike endows Marie with an obsessiveness and brilliance that brightly burns. But she also displays the woman’s vulnerability and the emotional scars left from childhood by the death of Marie’s mother.
Riley, in contrast, is calm and steadfast. He more than loves Marie, he admires her and is very taken by her intelligence.
Satrapi’s approach to “Radioactive” is slightly unconventional, even though she utilizes several of the genre’s tropes.
Despite its scattershot style, “Radioactive” is an interesting experience, covering the unorthodox lives of two scientific pioneers who helped shape the future more than they could have ever realized.
I am a founding member of the Indiana Film Journalists Association. I review movies, Blu-rays and DVDs for ReelBob (ReelBob.com), The Film Yap and other print and online publications. I can be reached by email at bobbloomjc@gmail.com. You also can follow me on Twitter @ReelBobBloom and on Facebook. My movie reviews also can be found at Rotten Tomatoes: www.rottentomatoes.com.
RADIOACTIVE
2½ stars out of 4
(R), thematic elements, disturbing images, nudity, sexual content