by Conan Simmons – August 9, 2020 – 3:31 pm
Bland biopic doesn’t know what it wants to say about its subject.
Rosamund Pike is a serious actress who always looks for a challenging role. Taking on the role of real life Nobel Prize winning scientist Marie Curie is practically a natural fit. Greer Garson played her in the classic 1943 film ‘Madame Curie’. As much as Rosamund Pike tries to carry this film there is nothing here to challenge the earlier film’s superiority. The movie itself throws too many curveballs that ultimately sink its chances.
The first time the film veers off course is an abrupt jump cut to 1957 Cleveland where some random boy is going to receive radiation therapy for cancer. The intention of the scene is to show how Marie Curie’s discovery of radium was used after her death. The actual effect of the scene is only confusion when after only a minute or two the film jump cuts back to late 1890’s Paris just after Marie Curie made her famous discovery. This scene at least keeps in line with what appears to be a movie celebrating Curie’s life. Not so for the jump cuts to follow.
As her husband Pierre begins his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1903 Sweden there is, without warning, a jump cut to what appears to be a jet plane only to immediately jump back to 1903. After another sentence of speechmaking the jump cut returns to take us into 1945 and inside the Enola Gay as it flies over Hiroshima, Japan. Historical accuracy flies out the window as the pilots clearly have never heard of radio silence while they nonchalantly drop the hydrogen bomb onto the peaceful citizens of the city below. The mushroom cloud rises and we jump back to hear the end of Pierre’s speech and the subsequent yelling at he receives from Marie, who was shunned from accepting the award. It’s extremely hard to feel sympathy for her after witnessing nearly 150,000 people die in an instant.
If that’s not enough to make the film veer off course into cult movie territory the next jump cut really ups the ante.
Again a jump cut takes us into the decades after Marie Curie’s death in the 1930’s. Now we are brought to 1961 Nevada. Two army officers routinely inspect a model town that is about to be destroyed in an atomic bomb test. At this point I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Indiana Jones climbing into a fridge. The bomb goes off in front of the most blank-faced goggle wearing spectators in history. Seriously, no one has a reaction to seeing this nuclear explosion.
And if that hasn’t raised the ante enough to make you wonder why you are still watching the movie doubles down.
The director must have thought it a stroke of genius to exempt the jump cut for the final flash forward. An easier, and at this point predictable, transition occurs with the sound of sirens and an oncoming firetruck that whisks us into 1986. Chernobyl. If the last flash forward had you thinking of ‘Night of the Comet’ this ‘wtf?’ moment as an unnamed firefighter gets sick inside the Chernobyl reactor will have you thinking of ‘Lifeforce’. I was really hoping for a giant alien monster to climb out of the big hole just to make the effect complete.
We are taken back to the life of Marie Curie as she attends her grown daughter, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, in driving an ambulance on the battlefields of World War One France. What little of the horrors of war that are shown literally pale in comparison to Chernobyl and Hiroshima. On the plus side, Anya Taylor-Joy is the one bright spot in this film as she provides a nice balance to the characters and matches the performance of Rosamund Pike.
It’s hard to know what the movie is trying to say about its subject when the movie itself doesn’t want to spend the time focusing on the subject. Are we supposed to feel joy for Marie Curie being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize or are we to feel anger that her discovery led to countless deaths in the decades that followed?