Radiant We, Decaying I: on 'Radioactive'
“You stole my brilliance!” Marie Curie screams at her husband and scientific partner Pierre after his return from Stockholm, where he had accepted their Nobel Prize alone. Marie had recently given birth to their second child and could not attend. She is furious that he said “I” when their work was collaborative. For his part, Pierre says he gave her credit (and if you read the speech, he did). In the new film Radioactive, directed by Marjane Satrapi, this tension between “we” and “I” is made central to both the Curies’ marriage and scientific partnership.
Like previous Marie Curie biopics, Radioactive focuses on her partnership—romantic and intellectual—with Pierre. That choice isn’t surprising, of course, given the source material. Radioactive is adapted from Lauren Redniss’ incredible 2010 graphic history of the same title. It also owes a debt to Eva Hemmungs Wirtén’s 2015 book Making Marie Curie. Where Redniss offers a meditation on “love and fallout,” Wirtén emphasizes the push-and-pull of the “we” and “I” in the Curies’ relationship. A fictionalized account of Marie’s life, Radioactive offers viewers more than a static “great scientist” staring at a glowing vial with her equally brilliant husband by her side.
In the film, Marie Curie is allowed to be a physical being. She rides a bicycle, sweats, has sex (with her husband and, after his death, a lover), falls ill, gives birth, gets dirty, skinny dips, weeps, collapses in grief, and stands ramrod straight under the disapproving glare of male scientists. Unlike written accounts of Marie’s brilliance, which can ignore or skim over the ways that science is embodied, the film shows how much hard work it took to discover radium and polonium. The Curies’ work depends on breaking down pitchblende, a uranium-rich mineral. This is not a genteel process; Marie is seen in the courtyard smashing bucket after bucket of it. Ultimately, the two had to process four tons of pitchblende to successfully isolate radium.
This physicality also underscores the emotional life of the Nobel-winning scientist. Marie and Pierre were, by all accounts, truly well matched: a meeting of the minds as well as lovers. Rather than suggest that a life of science is incompatible with sensuality, the film shows them taking great pleasure in each other and in their work. In one scene, they clutch a vial of radium in bed together.
Although the film sometimes verges on implying that she “had it all”—showing a pregnant Marie working in her lab or caring for her children while receiving the telegram announcing her second Nobel Prize—it does not shy away from the sexism that barred her from the highest levels of the French academy. Her antagonistic relationship with the physicist Gabriel Lippmann stands in for all the scientific men who, as she points out to him, “never liked [her] but respected [her].” I appreciated that the film does not make her into a feminist, depicting her as visibly uncomfortable with the support of the Stockholm women’s movement after her very public affair with Paul Langevin almost prevented her from accepting her second Nobel. She even tells her daughter Irene that a lack of resources, and not sexism, was the biggest barrier to her success.
Marie claims her intellectual success early and often in Radioactive. She refers to “my radium” and “my brilliance,” even telling Pierre that her “mind is finer” than his. When they present polonium and radium to the French academy, Pierre begins by saying “we thought we would find a new element,” referring to his work with Marie. As Marie describes the rays emitted by unstable elements, she says, “I have called this radioactivity.” Together, they tell the audience “we are here to tell you that you have misunderstood the atom.” This scene, along with their fight about Pierre’s Nobel speech, underscore the complicated relationship Marie must have had to her partnership with Pierre. He supported her work but, because of their marriage, there was always the risk that other people would fail to see her as a scientist in her own right. Throughout the film Marie is depicted as resistant to “we” even as she acknowledges that she could not have had the insights she did without Pierre’s help. Pierre, in contrast, is presented as already comfortable with collaboration and the “we.” The film handles this tension between collaboration and individual insight well.
Marie’s growing concern with the impact of her discovery on human health is subtly handled in her conversations with fellow researchers—but the film is less successful with its intercut scenes from the post-atomic age. In Redniss’ graphic history, short vignettes about cancer treatment, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl, and other nuclear events are interspersed throughout the book, offering an important corrective to a story that could all too easily become a simplistic tale of scientific progress and true love. These cutaways are illustrated in a different style and set apart from the body of the work. Unfortunately, what works in the graphic format does not translate well to the screen. In the film, these sudden leaps to the 1940s, 50s, and 80s feel jarring. Viewers receive very little information beyond text at the bottom of the screen indicating it is now “Hiroshima, 1947” or “Chernobyl, 1986.” The film depends on the assumption that these nuclear events are so well known that their interruption into the narrative needs no additional support.
Radioactive makes no claims to being an accurate film: it is a biopic, not a documentary. Sticklers will note, for example, that Marie was introduced to Pierre by a mutual friend rather than running into him randomly on the street. The film likewise skips over important episodes in her life, such as her trip to the United States and efforts to raise much needed funds for her research. Despite its emphasis on Marie’s physicality, the film also glosses over the years of sickness she experienced before her death. Radioactive is an uneven film that does not break new ground in the study of Marie Curie’s life. It does, however, offer a more nuanced version of Curie than I expected.
Image Credit: Marie and Pierre Curie (centre) with a man, using equipment in their laboratory, Paris. Photograph, ca. 1900. Credit: Wellcome Collection | (CC BY 4.0)
