ACTRESS ROS IS LAB-SOLUTELY FAB BUT
FOR the time being, the advice for movie fans is to keep calm and carry on visiting your local cinema.
But with studios pulling their biggest titles, it looks like we are going to have to live without suave spies and superheroes for the foreseeable future.
Sadly, I’m not sure this handsome but stodgy Marie Curie biopic is worth the risk of exposure to a deadly virus.
Rosamund Pike is well cast as the real-life super-heroine – the discoverer of two radioactive elements and a World War One icon who drove around the trenches with her portable X-ray machine.
When director Marjane Satrapi and screenwriter Jack Thorne aren’t inventing childhood traumas (here Curie has an implausible phobia of hospitals), they do a decent job of taking us through her achievements. But she never comes across as a three-dimensional human being. Nuance seems to have been sacrificed to the demands of crafting a feminist icon and an inspirational heroine.
Curie, we learn, is already well on her way to changing the world when, as Polish immigrant Maria Skłodowska, she runs into fellow boffin Pierre Curie (Sam Riley) in a Paris street in 1895.
Sparks don’t instantly fly, but Pierre wins the firebrand’s trust by offering her some space in his research lab.
Maria is initially reticent, being understandably wary of sharing her research with a Frenchman. But as the sexist bigwigs at the
Sorbonne have cut her funding, she reluctantly agrees to team up with dashing Pierre.
Luckily, his research dovetails nicely with hers. They get married, have two kids, and when he is awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on radium and polonium, he refuses to accept it unless it is jointly awarded to him and his wife.
The domestic drama is convincing, but too often the clunky dialogue feels designed to explain the importance of events rather than moving them on or getting us closer to the characters.
At one point Pierre wonders how their