RADIOACTIVE : Tuesday 10th November 2020.

'RADIOACTIVE' which I saw earlier in the week is an M Rated British biographical film Directed by Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, children's book author and film maker whose previous feature film outings take in 2007's 'Persepolis', 2011's 'Chicken with Plums' and 2014's 'The Voices'. This film is based on the 2010's graphic novel 'Radioactive : Marie & Pierre Curie - A Tale of Love and Fallout' by Lauren Redniss, and saw its World Premier screening as the Closing Night film at TIFF back in September 2019, before its scheduled release due in March this year, which was subsequently cancelled due to COVID-19 and released digitally in mid-June, and in cinemas around Australia a couple of weeks ago now. The film has garnered mixed or average Reviews so far and taken just over US$2.5M at the Box Office.

The film opens up with an ageing Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike) collapsing in her Paris laboratory in 1934. Her lab assistants come to her aid and she is rushed to hospital. While being stretchered in she remembers her life going back to 1893 when she was studying physics, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Paris, France. Gabriel Lippmann (Simon Russell Beale) presided over the faculty and held the purse strings and the head strong and outspoken Curie often collided with him over funding for her research, for the interference in her laboratory, and probably because she was female in very much a mans world. She is ousted from her laboratory by Lippmann and his panel of colleagues, and so is forced to find alternative accommodation and a place to conduct her experiments and research. 

One evening by chance she literally stumbles into Pierre Curie (Sam Riley). In time the pair develop a close relationship, after Pierre invites Marie to share his own laboratory space which she agrees to albeit reluctantly, saying that she prefers to work alone without the distraction of others, or sharing the fruits of her experiments. However, she soon relents and in time the couple are married, ultimately having two children - Irene (Indica Watson as the six year old, and then Anya Taylor-Joy as the grown woman) and Eve, the younger sister (Cara Bossom).

Soon afterwards Marie announces her discovery of two new elements - radium and polonium and with it radioactivity which completely revolutionises physics and chemistry. Within a couple of years radium, which glows bright green, is being used in a number of commercial applications from matches, to toothpaste and playing cards. Pierre even takes Marie to a seance (under the guise that it's science after all) where radium is used to attempt to contact the dead, but Marie disapproves of spiritualism and any notion of a life after this one following the death of her mother in Poland

In 1903 Pierre is nominated to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics in Stockholm, and insists that it be shared in joint names with his wife Marie. On the occasion of his visit to Stockholm just before he is about to make his acceptance speech he coughs up blood, having developed a hacking cough in the lead up to the ceremony which he has been unable to shake off. Upon returning home Marie has become agitated that he attended without her (she didn't want to go) and accepted the prize in his own right (which he did not), and the pair fight. Later having made up, Pierre is becoming increasingly sick with anaemia as a result of his ongoing research into radioactivity, and one night, in the rain, while crossing the busy Rue Dauphine he slips on the cobble stones and falls under a heavy horse drawn cart. He is killed outright instantly when one of the wheels runs over his head, fracturing his skull. It was the 19th April 1906 and Pierre was 46 years of age. 

Marie is devastated by the death of her Pierre. She originally dismissed the idea that her elements are toxic, even though ever increasing numbers of people were dying from serious health conditions after exposure to radium. Depressed, she begins an affair with her colleague Paul Langevin (Aneurin Barnard). She is subsequently invited by Lippmann to apply for Pierre's Professorship at the Sorbonne, and tells the gathered panel that she will not apply and that if they choose to give her the position she will gladly accept on the basis that her work speaks for itself and that this should be their key decision making factor. She gets the job needless to say and is the first female Professor at the University of Paris. At around the same time the French nationalist press reports on the details of her affair with Langevin, including personal and intimate letters sent between the two. She is harassed in the street and at home by xenophobic mobs due to her Polish origins, with the press taunting her as a Jewish home wrecker even though Langevin had been estranged from his wife during their affair. Langevin caves into the pressure and goes back to his wife ending his year long relationship with Marie.

In 1911 she is nominated to receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She defies the Committee's instructions not to travel to Stockholm because of the bad press surrounding her affair, and is greeted enthusiastically by the local dignitaries and audience in attendance at the awards ceremony, many of whom are women. 

In 1914, with the outbreak of the World War, her daughter Irene convinces her to run X-Ray units from the back of ambulances on the Western Front in order to determine whether or not amputation is needed for wounded soldiers. Marie offers to fund the X-Ray diagnostic units by selling her gold Nobel Prize medals to the government, but they reject this notion and reluctantly agree to put up the funding following a very persuasive argument. 

Irene begins dating Frederic Joliot (Edward Davis), but Marie disapproves of their relationship because they have been researching artificial radioactivity and warns Irene not to see him or research radioactivity anymore because it is so life threateningly dangerous. Although she refuses to obey her, they go to the Western Front together to run the X-Ray machine.

Throughout the film we see scenes of the negative impact of her discoveries upon humanity. First off there is the dropping of the two Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 effectively ending WWII, then there is experimental external beam radiotherapy on a young lad in a hospital in Cleveland in 1956, then a nuclear bomb test in the Nevada desert in 1961, and finally the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Fast forwarding to 1934 we see Marie in hospital coming round with visions of her cradled in her dying mothers arms in Poland as a young child, and the events played out in flash-forwards to those negative impacts. Pierre arrives to collect her and they leave the hospital together. She died on 4th July 1934 from aplastic anaemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during WWI. She was 66 years of age. 

As the closing credits roll, we learn that the Curies' X-Ray unit saved over a million lives during the war, that their research would be used to create radiotherapy, and that the Joliot-Curies would discover artificial radioactivity in 1935 for which they would both receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry that year. 

Having read the very mixed Reviews of 'Radioactive', I went into my local multiplex with my expectations set none too highly. That said, I was pleasantly surprised when the final credits rolled. Rosamund Pike gives a compelling performance as Marie Curie with her staunchly opinionated view of the world, her ahead of her time feminist beliefs and her outspoken fearless and highly educated manner with just about anyone and everyone. Sam Riley is equally on fine form here as the foil to Pike's Marie - as the put upon scientist who cannot believe he's bagged a woman more intelligent, more educated and perhaps more committed to science than he is, and is prepared to stand up for what she believes in. Whilst Marjane Satrapi has crafted a film that looks great and on the surface does contain many elements that played out in the real lives of the Curie's, there are some obvious moments of poetic license and dramatic effect that dilute the impact of the film and relegate it from what it truly could have been to what it simply is. In the final analysis the film serves as an important reminder of what a great scientist Marie Curie was, and how the influence of her groundbreaking work still radiates to this day. 

'Radioactive' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.

    

-Steve, at Odeon Online-