Director Report Card: Marjane Satrapi (2020)

5. Radioactive

Marjane Satrapi, as a filmmaker, has had her brush with Oscar gold. “Perspeolis,” after all, was nominated for an Academy Award. Her subsequent features have all been too quirky or not prestige-y enough to garner much in the way of Oscar attention. While I have no proof, one suspects Satrapi was really hoping to gain some award season attention with her latest feature. “Radioactive” is a biopic of Marie Curie, a world-famous historical figure, a woman that changed history during a time when suffrage was still an on-going concern. One assumes this was the plan but “Radioactive” would not earn any gold statues. In fact, it's probably the worst reviewed movie of Satrapi's career.

In 1934, world renown scientist Marie Curie collapses suddenly at her laboratory. As she's carried off to the hospital, he looks back on her life. She recalls a time in 1893, when her proposal for a bigger lab was rejected and she, by chance, met Pierre Curie. The two bonded over their love of science and fell into a whirlwind romance. Working together, Marie and Pierre discover polonium and radium. The discovery earns them awards and global attention, yet Marie still struggles with her role as a woman in a deeply sexist field and her past traumas. It soon becomes apparent that exposure to radioactive elements is hazardous to her health, Pierre growing sick before dying in a freak accident. Marie continues to struggle against the prejudice of her time, her growing sickness, and her desire to do good in the world.

If it doesn't seem like the biography genre has much to interest the director of “The Voices,” there are occasional indications inside “Radioactive” that it is a Marjane Satrapi movie. The movie includes several elaborate fantasy sequences. A dancer in a color-changing dress moves throughout several memories. As Marie and Pierre conceive their first child together, their shadows drift off and specks of light within a void fuse together. After her husband's death, Curie experiences an upsetting dream full of slow-motion and backwards imagery. Later, when having an anxiety attack upon entering a hospital, similar techniques are utilized to display her state of mind. 

Aside from those brief flights of fancy, there's very little of the visual panache I associate with Satrapi's movies. In fact, “Radioactive” has very little of “The Voices'” bright colors or “Chicken with Plums'” opulent photography. Most of the film is shot in an overly dour fashion. The entire movie is seemingly colored by a sickly green hue – I suppose as a reference to Curie's famous glowing isotopes – that is matched with a damp gray color. Most of the movie's visual palette gives the impression of an overcast and rainy day. It's a disappointingly dreary direction for the filmmaker to take, after her last movie was so visually vibrant.

There is another indication that this is a Marjane Satrapi film. The opening framing device, of Marie Curie on her death bed looking back at her life, recalls “Chicken with Plums” and parts of “Persepolis.” Like those films, “Radioactive” leaps around in time... Yet it does not stay confined to Curie's life. Instead, the film jumps around in time, showing the effects of radiation throughout human history. We see radiation therapy being used to fight a young boy's cancer. We also see the H-bomb being dropped on Japan or a glimpse at the Chernobyl disaster. The point the film is trying to make with these sequences is never entirely clear. It certainly doesn't have much to do with Curie's life and feels like a pretentious attempt to make the movie deeper and more important than it actually is. It's a misstep and, especially when the film is invoking the annihilation of Hiroshima in the middle of its runtime, feels in questionable taste.  

The first half of “Radioactive” is largely focused on Marie and Pierre's romance. The two are treated to a rom-com style meet-cute that involves Pierre picking up a note book Marie dropped and handing it to her. The two meet up later, falling deeply in love shortly there after. The film attempts to portray the passion these two had for each other. We are shown them skinny-dipping on their honeymoon. Repeatedly, the film has Pierre express how much his wife means to him, how he can't imagine his life without her. Yet it never quite clicks. For all its attempts to poke into the intimate inner lives of these famous figures, their depiction never feels very real or especially touching. This great love of their's feels more implied than actually shown.

Most of the posters for “Radioactive” feature a tagline referencing Curie as being a “rebel.” There's a lot of attention paid to her status as a female scientist, in a time notoriously unfriendly to women in a professional status. When the Curies receive the Nobel Prize, Marie has to fight to be recognized. When Pierre goes to speak on her behalf, she is incensed with him. Numerous old men on various councils challenge Marie throughout the movie. Yet “Radioactive” very rarely addresses the systemic problems behind such wide-spread sexism. In some moments, like when the wife of a colleague Marie sleeps with after Pierre's death confronts her and attacks her because of her Polish nationality, the film feels less interested in the struggles a woman of the time – or any time – faces trying to be taken seriously and more like juicy 19th century drama. 

This is far from the only misstep the film takes when addressing its topic. “Radioactive” is, ostensibly, a movie about science. Yet it spends surprisingly little time on actually discussing why Marie and Pierre's work was so groundbreaking. We are treated to a few fancy light shows, attempting to explain the science behind these discoveries. A handful of montages expound on their scientific processes. None of it is that well fleshed out. More often, “Radioactive” feels like it is telling us how important the Curies' work was, instead of actually teaching us about how important it was. Coming out of the film, I felt like I barely knew any more about its subject than I did going in. 

The parts of “Radioactive” that turn out to be most enlightening are its more minor touches. The film depicts the Curies are celebrities of their time. After their discovery of new elements become worldwide news, radiation essentially becomes a fad. We see radium being used in every from matches to chocolates. This is not only darkly humorous, considering we all know how dangerous radiation is, but also an insight into the culture of the time. Similarly, the film's brief detours into the world of spiritualism – which Marie rejected by Pierre was intrigued by – is also interesting. It's a nice contrast that one of the most lauded scientific minds of the time could fall for a obvious hoax. Or how it reflected on his relationship with his skeptical wife. These minor scenes end up being the most compelling in the entire movie.

Biopics like this are almost always intended to show off the lead actor's abilities. Rosalind Pike stars as Marie Curie. Pike is okay. She does a good job of playing the turmoil Marie feels in her day-to-day life, grappling with a life time of trauma and her growing awareness of her own mortality. Yet the script ultimately lets Pike down. Marie Curie is, too often, reduced to a series of easily understood quirks. She has a phobia of hospital, because she watched her mother die in one when she was a child. She's socially awkward in her early scenes, because she's a woman more interested in science than social niceties. We never seem to get a real sense of her as a person, only as a collection of character traits.

Pike is backed up by a capable supporting cast that is also let down by the thin screenplay. Sam Riley plays Pierre and does a good job of balancing his intellectual pursuits with his emotional devotion to his wife, even if we never get a very deep dive into his motivations for either of this goals. Anna Taylor-Joy has a late-in-the-film appearance as the adult version of Curie's daughter, Irene. Irene, of course, was also a scientist and Nobel winner who eventually died from extended exposure to radiation. “Radioactive” can only hint at this and instead depicts Irene as someone pushing her mother back into the field late in life. Taylor-Joy is excellent at playing a young spit-fire, so she's well cast, but the character is never more than a sketch.

Even if the romance never entirely works, it's still the most interesting part of “Radioactive.” Once Pierre exits the film, the film devolves into a shapeless and depressing biopic chronicling the personal and professional failures of Marie's later life. She begins a desperate affair with a colleague. She grows more ostracized, the public turning on her due to the dangerous nature of radiation. As World War I starts, Curie is exposed to the horrors of the war. It's just more misery piled on top of each other, none of it feeling especially pointed or meaningful. “Radioactive” often feels like its running through a checklist of facts about Curie's life, strung along a standard rise, fall, and rise again story arc. 

“Radioactive” was distributed by Amazon Studios, who originally intended to give the movie a wide theatrical release. Presumably, this would have been in hopes of gathering some Oscar buzz. Instead, 2020 happened and “Radioactive” squeaked out onto streaming without getting much attention... Not much positive attention anyway. The movie did attract some minor controversy for the inaccuracies it depicts in Curie's life. (I can't say I noticed this, as I'm not a Curie expert. Sorry, chemistry was never my strong suit.) Satrapi's defense to this was that “Radioactive” was not based on Curie's life but rather a graphic novel inspired by her life. Controversial or not, “Radioactive” less than glowing reception was justified. It's a shallow biography executed with a frequently clumsy hand. [Grade: C-]

Marjane Satrapi continues to be an artist I'm interested in. If “Radioactive's” underwhelming reception and quality ends up sinking her career as a filmmaker, I imagine she'll continue to work on her impressive, funny, and insightful graphic novels. Her first four feature films, anyway, are a collection of quirky and interesting motion pictures that I enjoy a lot. (Even the one I couldn't really understand.) I certainly hope that “Radioactive” was just a misstep and not a sign of things to come. Even if it was, we'll always have “Persepolis” and “The Voices.”