Radioactive Review: Marie Curie and

“Radioactive” Review: Marie Curie and the Science of Autonomy

Rosamund Pike plays the pioneering scientist who won two nobel Prizes while raising tvo daughters (one won her own nobel).

Radioactive”, a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject. Given her endeavors and accolades - including two Nobel Prizes - this simple, humanizing effort proves tough but also feels necessary. One of the most celebrated scientists of the 20th century, Curie has long been lauded as a pioneer and is the only woman to win a Nobel twice, having first shared the prize for physics in 1903. Eight years later, she won for chemistry, defying a scandal to pick up her award and remind the world that she merited a claim on history. "Radioactive" gives Curie her due while complicating her legacy. She and her husband, Pierre, discovered polonium and radium - she coined the word radioact vity - work which led to medical advances and the atomic bomb. For his Nobel lecture, Pierre Curie alluded to the ominous import of their findings, asking "whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it." (The antediluvian Nobel speaker at the ceremony referred to Marie as a help meet, citing Genesis.) It takes a little while for "Radioactive" to find its groove. It opens with Marie - Rosamund Pike, in sunglasses and under a schrnear of jowly wrinkles - collapsing and being carted off to a hospital. The mists of time quickly clear and Marie is soon in Paris in 1893, where she bumps into the flirty, goateed Pierre (Sam Riley), who marvels that she is reading about microbiology. It's a strained meet cute, but the director Marjane Satrapi has more than romance in mind, and you're soon racing with Marie to a showdown with some Sorbonne graybeards. This brisk pace largely continues for the rest of the movie as Marie hurtles through time, making history, trouble and babies.