“Radioactive” (M) ***

DESPITE, or perhaps because of, having Lauren Redniss’s book “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout” as a source, Jack Thorne must metaphorically have sweated a certain amount of blood when writing the screenplay for this filmic account of the private, public, professional and family lives of the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win two of them.

Essentially paraphrasing Marie’s life from 1893 until her death aged 66 in 1934 from aplastic anaemia caused by years of exposure to radiation, “Radioactive” may pose problems for filmgoers unfamiliar with her name and the intellectual issues and complex scientific challenges confronting her and Pierre in studying the chemistry and physics of substances and their behaviour that, for good or for bad alike, are now commonplace.

From applying Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1895 Nobel Prize-winning discovery of what he called X-rays as a medical diagnostic tool that saved lives on World War I battlefields and became commonplace, along a line of direct connection to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the film treads a difficult line through an awesome assembly of facts, science, personal tragedies and glories, and French political shenanigans. 

Most of the burden falls upon Oscar-nominee Rosamund Pike as Marie. She’s up to the task. It does the film no harm that she is a classic English beauty, perhaps more so than the real Marie.

The supporting cast includes Sam Riley as the unfortunate Pierre who didn’t get out of the way of a horse-drawn vehicle in Paris. Aneurin Barnard plays physicist Paul Langevin, friend and colleague of Einstein, reputedly Marie’s lover after Pierre’s death. 

And there’s a big bunch of bewhiskered gents too numerous to list playing members of French learned societies that Marie found herself confronting to get her achievements recognised.

I enjoyed “Radioactive” despite director Marjane Satrapi’s penchant for sprinkling it with soft-edged, low-key images that don’t advance the narrative in any perceptible manner. 

At all cinemas

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