‘Radioactive’ Amazon Prime Review: Stream It or Skip It?
Marie Curie gets the biopic treatment via Amazon original movie Radioactive, with Rosamund Pike in front of the camera and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) behind it. That’s a promising actress-director combo, but historical period pieces like this are a dicey proposition, because they can be either rich and rewarding, or put the BORE in la-BORE-atory.
RADIOACTIVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: PARIS, 1934. Rosamund Pike wears old-person makeup as Marie Curie, influential physicist and chemist, coiner of the term “radioactivity,” founder of the elements polonium and radium, two-time Nobel Prize winner and unapologetic, unbendable, irrepressible woman in a man’s man’s man’s man’s world. She walks into her lab and stumbles to the floor. As she’s wheeled on a gurney through hospital corridors, her life flashes before her eyes. Jump back to 1893, when she was still Marie Sklodowska. She’s stonewalled by HARRUMPHS behind fluttering mustaches that would rather make an example out of her than admit a woman can be an extraordinary scientist. And on top of that, these arrogant and corpulent white men say, she’s a person of the Polish persuasion, and that’s just no good.
Marie is frustrated but determined. She needs a new place to study, a place where she’ll be respected. One fellow scientist notices the tenacity of the woman and the validity of her work — Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), who partners with her in his lab. The FLAMES of LUST just IGNITE in the Bunsen burners as they use pipettes to put liquid into beakers, if you know what I mean. Before you know it, they’re married, romping naked through tall lakeside grasses and smashing pitchblende and discovering radium and studying its qualities and rewriting some of the fundamentals of atomic physics.
She gets pregnant, and Pierre develops a Movie Cough, which is what happens in movies when people get deathly ill. Flash-forward to Cleveland, 1957, when little Peter, suffering from cancer, is wheeled into a room and subjected to a new, experimental radiation treatment. Marie and Pierre attend a seance; he’s fascinated, she’s skeptical. She gives birth; they score their first Nobel Prize; the pilots of the Enola Gay drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Triumph and tragedy, triumph and tragedy.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The balloon movie. You know, the one where the British woman and the British man together ascend way too high into the atmosphere in a gas balloon to study the weather and push the boundaries of human discovery and endurance? Right: The Aeronauts. This movie reminds me of The Aeronauts, in all its middlingness.
Performance Worth Watching: Is Rosamund Pike worth watching in just about anything? Perhaps. She cuts through some biopic cliches (e.g., that damn distracting old-age makeup, flashbacks to traumatic childhood moments) and does her best to find the woman who stood steadfast in the face of great public and professional criticism and sexism, and never apologized for who she was.
Memorable Dialogue: Pierre shows he’s well aware of Marie’s accomplishments via this exchange:
Pierre: “You’re one of only 23 female scientists in the department.”
Marie: “A prime number!”
Sex and Skin: Just a couple of butts.
Our Take: What a strange movie. Satrapi is clearly trying to juice up the biopic formula with surreal-ish flash-forwards to scenes illustrating the positive and negative effects of Marie Curie’s experiments with radioactivity — which ultimately caused the anemia that killed her, mind you. Such is the tragic irony of her life’s work, and her life itself as well. The film clearly wants to do justice to this great woman, who radiates perseverance and commitment to her work and to herself. She was dangerous to the status quo, hence the title.
The film is full of visual artistry, with inspired scene transitions and gorgeous lighting design. Tonally, however, it’s wildly inconsistent, the choppy, piecemeal screenplay rendering some moments brilliant and provocative, and others stiff and dreadful, almost laughable. A sequence in which a Las Vegas bomb test melts a fake suburb full of JC Penney mannequins with a wall of flame is terrifying; a would-be poignant chapter on Curie’s contributions to World War I — she worked the frontlines as a medic, using the X-ray machines and radon treatments she developed — is clunky and perfunctory, another life-nugget tossed into the grab-bag of ideas.
Jack Thorne’s script is a thing of great obviousness, laden with leaden declarations of love and thematic hammers-on-anvils: “I have an instinct about you,” says the scientist devoted to a life of cold logic to his soon-to-be scientist wife who’s also devoted to a life of cold logic, and who then proceeds to cheekily point out to him how “an instinct” is not a thing a scientist devoted to a life of cold logic should succumb to. Woof. Suffice to say, the romance never really kindles into warmth, and the science stuff is vague and unconvincing. The film’s attempt to jam in all the highlights of her life is standard biopic too-muchness (the ever-talented Anya Taylor-Joy turns up late in the movie like an afterthought, playing the adult version of Marie’s daughter Eve, a budding scientist). Pike does what she can to the one dramatic constant in Radioactive, but it ultimately flounders beneath its ambition.
Our Call: SKIP IT. The effects of Marie Curie’s work was very much a mixed bag: lives saved, lives destroyed. I guess it makes at least some sense, unfortunately, that Radioactive wavers so greatly in its effectiveness.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
Stream Radioactive on Amazon Prime
