‘Radioactive’ reveals Madame Curie’s mixed legacy

Movie review: “Radioactive,” directed by Marjane Satrapi, starring Rosamund Pike, Sam Riley, Anya Taylor-Joy. Available to stream through Amazon Prime.

We live in an age of historical rediscovery. Far from the Disneyfied versions of the past that once were routinely taught in American schools, much of the history being written – in some cases rewritten – today tells a much larger, more complete story.

We aren’t being regaled just by tales about how the “West was won,” how a series of righteous wars was waged and, most of all, about how a group of courageous men – and they were all men – rebelled against an English king and fought for American independence. We are now being told, too, more specifically about the fate of the indigenous peoples whom the mostly white settlers displaced, about the questionable reasons for some of those wars (case in point: the Mexican-American War of 1846-48) and of all the individuals who weren’t included in this new government – to use Abraham Lincoln ’s words – of the people, by the people and for the people.

Blend in the stories of those disregarded people – slaves, women and, at least at first, anyone who owned no property – with the overall effects of slavery and the mostly ignored story of women in the development of America and you have a far more comprehensive picture of U.S. history.

Recognizing these shortcomings shouldn’t make us admire the country’s better qualities any less. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom” – Jefferson, himself, both as author of the Declaration of Independence and as the owner of slaves, being a perfect example of this very duality.

The same holds true for Madame Curie, or more specifically Marie Skłodowska Curie , the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobels and the only person to win Nobels in two different scientific fields, first in physics (shared with her husband Pierre) and then chemistry.

In the Amazon Prime film “Radioactive,” directed by Marjane Satrapi and adapted from the mixed-media 2010 book by Lauren Redniss, “Radioactive” reveals far more of Skłodowska Curie’s life than, say, the Oscar-nominated 1943 bio-pic titled, simply enough, “Madame Curie.” Starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, that film was a melodramatic look at the Curies’ marriage, research and legacy, and one that perfectly reflected a 1940s way of thinking.

Satrapi, working from a script that was screenwriter Jack Thorne’s attempt to capture the multi-dimensional aspects of Redniss’ book, takes a far more contemporary view – one that includes the controversial with the congratulatory.

Washington Post reviewer Marcia Bartusiak described Redniss’ book as “a blend of original art, photographs, graphics and text” and the first so-called “visual book” to be named a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. It’s the unusual nature of Redniss’ source material that Satrapi, who directed the animated 2007 version of her own graphic novel “Persepolis,” uses to portray the future effects of the very elements Skłodowska Curie discovered, radium and polonium.

Which is how we come to see sequences of the Enola Gay dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 – Skłodowska Curie having died a full decade earlier – and the devastating effects the resulting explosion and radiation exposure had on the Japanese populace. We see the post-war atomic tests in New Mexico. And, again, mixing the positive with the negative, we see some of the first radioactive treatments in the fight against cancer.

All this is included in an otherwise mostly standard story of how the Polish-born Skłodowska Curie (played by Rosamund Pike ) comes to Paris, how she is treated poorly by the men in charge of the University of Paris, how she meets Pierre (played by Sam Riley ) and how, after falling in love, they embark on their ground-breaking research.

Satrapi, though, is intent on presenting the entire picture that the 1943 film ignored, so she also illustrates Skłodowska Curie’s various human fallibilities. Her lack of parenting skills, for example: At one point when her daughter intrudes into her bedroom, she casually asks the child, “Are you in need of feeding.”

Satrapi also makes it clear how much Skłodowska Curie flouted societal norms, how following her husband’s death she embarked on an affair with a married man, behavior that was then, even in France, considered scandalous. Her reputation was restored only after the brave service she provided saving French soldiers with a portable x-ray machine during World War I.

What Satrapi’s movie makes clear is that humans, even the heroes among us, are multifaceted creatures, as gifted as we are sometimes flawed. Whether this changes your opinion of the much-honored Marie Skłodowska Curie may reflect your attitude toward revisionist history in general: And the conclusion you come to is likely to be as personal as it is natural.