Who wants to watch a dryly enacted biopic of Madame Marie Curie? It’s not as if Curie, a Polish immigrant born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, had a dull life. No siree, after all, she’s still the only woman to win two Nobel prizes thanks to her work in discovering radium and polonium at the turn of the 20th century. Her accomplishments were actually endless, and in “Radioactive,” director Marjane Satrapi makes sure you know all of them, cramming in close to 50 years’ worth of Curie’s life into 111 minutes of filmmaking. Satrapi even decides to show us the consequences of Curie’s discovery, from the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 to the lives lost due to the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Distracting? You bet. Her film is all over the place, despite a strong performance from Rosamund Pike as Curie. The usual highs and lows that come with the biopic territory are shown here, the tragic and sudden death of her French husband and fellow physicist Pierre Curie (Sam Riley) is dramatically trivialized, ditto Curie’s affair with married doctoral student Paul Langevin (Aneurin Barnard), a friend of her late husband’s. More intriguing is the story of her two daughters: Eve (Cara Bossom), who wrote the landmark biography of her mother; and Irene (Anya Taylor-Joy), who also studied radioactivity, both of whom received Nobel prizes for their work. It’s a real shame Sartrapi can’t infuse her film with the same artful energy she brought to her uber-personal 2007 animated masterpiece, “Persepolis.” Here, the Iranian-born filmmaker is left stranded by Jack Thorne’s lifeless script, which is filled with insufferable exposition and inert dramatic tension. Not only did the audience deserve better than this trite biopic, but more importantly, so did Curie. [D+]
Radioactive will be available on Amazon Prime starting July 24th
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