BEFORE: Anya Taylor-Joy carries over from "Thoroughbreds", and I know I'm a few days late for Women's History Month - that was March and I failed to observe it. So I hope to make up for that a bit tonight with the story of two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie. We cool? I mean, I was busy finishing up the romance chain and then there was St. Patrick's Day, I had to watch "Space Jam 2", it was a whole thing. Look, I've basically re-scheduled Black History Month for April, with planned documentaries about Arthur Ashe, Venus and Serena Williams, Buddy Guy, Miles Davis and Dionne Warwick, so these things happen when I can make them happen, it's still a positive thing that they happen, right?
THE PLOT: The incredible true story of Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her Nobel Prize-winning work that changed the world.
AFTER: OK, so Anya's only in this one near the end, she plays Marie Curie's daughter Irene at the age of 18, who convinces her mother to get involved in saving lives during World War I by putting her science to work, creating mobile x-ray units near the front lines so that injured soldiers could be examined and treated sooner, saving limbs and lives. The only thing is, the latest research indicates that working so closely with unshielded x-ray equipment is probably a key thing that contributed to Marie Curie's death at the age of 66 in 1934. Umm, Happy Mother's Day?
It probably didn't help that Curie and her husband Pierre isolated and discovered the elements radium and polonium, which are, well, you know, what the title of the film is. I'm not even adding the sarcastic quote-marks I usually add when I talk about Isaac Newton "discovering" gravity, which is a load of B.S. Gravity was always there, everybody knew that when you drop something it falls to the ground, so all he did was NAME it, he sure as hell didn't discover it. Does not count. If you create a new combination of foods in a sandwich, that's an accomplishment, but if you just take roast beef, american cheese and mayo and re-name it a Douche Bag sandwich, you really haven't done anything. But Marie Curie noticed that some uranium samples were more volatile than others, so that led her to believe that another element was present, one even more radioactive. Oh yeah, she and Pierre also coined the term "radioactive", which means that an unstable element is emitting ionized particles as it decays. It's a dumb term, because it just means something is radiating, or radiant, in the same we call the moving pictures "movies" or cooked biscuits "cookies" or flies "flies" because they fly. Umm, lots of other insects fly around too, but we only call one of them "flies", it's very stupid.
The thing is, even once they defined radioactivity (which is a word that really should have been saved for broadcasting, if you think about it. DJs should really be called "radio activists" when they're actively on the radio.) nobody knew it was dangerous. And they only found out after the people who spent the most time working with radioactive thingies started getting sick. Yeah, a heads up probably would have been nice, Marie. Marie's husband, Pierre, was hit by a horse-drawn carriage in 1906 and died, but by then he was already showing signs of overexposure to radiation, coughing up blood, at least, according to this film.
Here's what the film gets right - after Pierre's death, Marie was offered his chair in the physics department at the University of Paris, and with some convincing and complaining, she accepted it. She became the first woman professor at that university. She then went on to create the Radium Institute, one of the first radioactive laboratories. Marie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and originally the award was going to go just to Pierre and Henri, but with some advocation and complaints, Marie's name was added. Then she won a second Nobel in 1911 for Chemistry.
But here's what the movie gets wrong - it shows Pierre going solo to Stockholm to accept the 1903 award and give a speech - and at first Marie's cool with that, but then she holds it against him. The truth is that NEITHER of them went to the ceremony in 1903, they were both too damn busy, and Pierre was feeling ill (gee, I wonder why...). But they finally traveled there TOGETHER in 1905 and accepted their prizes and the award money. And this award was for their work in radiation, NOT the isolation and discovery of radium and polonium. That was the reason for Marie's solo award in Chemistry in 1911 - geez, get it right, filmmakers!
Marie also stood up to the "cancel culture" of the scientific world back then - some people hated her because of her affair with a married former student, Paul Langevin, and other people in France didn't like her because she was a foreigner, an atheist, and falsely believed to be Jewish. She got her second Nobel anyway, even though the committee head tried to prevent her appearance because of her affair, but in the end it was determined that there was no relation between her scientific work and her private life. Since there was no social media back then, it was a lot easier to rise above the haters.
The movie plays a bit fast-and-loose with the laws of filmmaking - there are flash-forwards to show the impact of some of Marie Curie's discoveries, with effects both good and bad. A young boy is seen getting cancer treatments with radium, after the revelation that radium destroyed tumor cells father than healthy ones. (but was the cure worse than the disease? IDK.). Another flash-forward shows the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one depicts a nuclear bomb test in Nevada in 1961, and the third is set during the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. But there's just no way Marie could have possibly had visions of these events, so we can't really take this seriously, it's a technique meant to show the modern audience some of the impacts of her discoveries. Which brings me back to Newton, if he hadn't named gravity when he did, somebody probably would have named it something else a few years later. You can't really hold Curie responsible for Hiroshima and Chernobyl, because things like these might still have happened, just later in time if she hadn't discovered radioactivity when she did. That would be a bit like blaming Isaac Newton every time somebody falls off a tall building and died on the ground, or blaming the Wright Brothers every time a plane crashes.
But hey, let's celebrate science nerds, and perhaps Marie Curie was the first female one. And according to this she was a looker, too (her real photo is on Wikipedia, prepare to be disappointed, as she's nowhere near as hot as Rosamund Pike). But she and Pierre liked to go skinny-dipping, that's cool, science nerds need to get freaky sometimes, too, nothing wrong with that. But if you're into watching famous scientists getting it on, check this out - also that "Genius" documentary about Einstein, where he marries his cousin. That's so naughty - but true!
Marie Sklodowska was just a poor Polish girl who studied hard and married upwards, and then became a scientific genius, but as best as we can determine, it was the thing she studied that killed her, and no, I daon't really know what to do with that information, just acknowledge that every success comes at a cost, I guess.
Also starring Rosamund Pike (last seen in "The Informer"), Sam Riley (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Sian Brooke, Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Ariella Glaser, Indica Watson (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Cara Bossom, Aneurin Barnard (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Edward Davis (last seen in "Emma."), Katherine Parkinson (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Tim Woodward (last seen in "Criminal"), Jonathan Aris (last seen in "Birthday Girl"), Mirjam Novak (last seen in "Papillon" (2017)), Demetri Goritsas (ditto), Corey Johnson (last seen in "Morbius"), Michael Gould (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Drew Jacoby, Paul Albertson, Yvette Feuer, Ralph Berkin, Faye Bradbrook, Harriet Turnbull (last seen in "Cats"), Georgina Rich (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Elise Alexandre, Alexis Latham (last seen in "Colette"), Federica Fracassi, Charles Tumbridge, Peter Fancsikai, Richard Pepple (last seen in "Beasts of No Nation"), Alex Bartram (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), Isabella Miles, Martin Anzor, Tamás Szabó.
RATING: 6 out of 10 attendees at the Solvay Conference
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