Pike has chemistry with costar
Rosamund Pike is getting interesting. She’s been interesting for several years, but now a pattern has emerged, and it’s time to talk about it.
Since playing the manipulative, diabolical wife in “Gone Girl,” Pike hasn’t done what most actresses do in a similar career situation. She hasn’t taken boring wife and girlfriend roles in equally big movies, while waiting for another great role in a massive commercial film. Instead, she has taken grandscale roles in smaller movies — such as “Radioactive,” a movie about the life of scientist Marie Curie that will be available to stream starting Friday, July 24.
Not everyone will see “Radioactive,” just as few saw Pike’s remarkable performances in “A Private War,” as war correspondent Marie Colvin, and “7 Days in Entebbe,” as a fanatical German terrorist. Nonetheless, this is a valuable and emerging body of work, there for anyone to discover, either now or later. These are films about dynamic, driven women in the grip of obsessions and forces they cannot control.
Moreover — and this has as much to do with how Pike plays these roles as with the roles themselves — her films are very much about being a woman. They deal with the specific pressures, external and internal, in a woman’s life and consciousness. In the case of “A Private War,” for example, Pike played Colvin as particularly drawn to the
plight of women and children in war zones, and images of their torment haunted her nights.
In “Radioactive,” Marie Sklodowska (Pike) is a physicist doing research in 1890s Paris. She is a genius, and she knows it, and lets everyone else know it, something that, because she’s a woman, makes her an unpleasant eccentric in the eyes of her colleagues. Without it ever having to be said, Pike and director Marjane Satrapi communicate that Marie accepts that her scientific calling will be her entire life, that she is too singular and exacting to expect to meet a soulmate.
And then she does. But neither she nor her soulmate realizes it at first. But Pierre Curie (Sam Riley) is her intellectual equal and, more to the point, he understands that she is his intellectual equal.
They establish a scientific partnership, but we see, from the beginning, the basis for a personal partnership as well. He is as easygoing as she is fierce and as big a dreamer as she is a skeptic. Together, they’re the whole package.
Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes, the first in physics and the second in chemistry, but “Radioactive” is the story of a career, not just the accolades. Much like “A Private War,” it gives a full picture, in the sense that it shows and dwells on the costs of this great career.
Marie and Pierre work in a dingy laboratory all day. Eventually, they discover radium and polonium and coin the term “radioactivity,” and everything’s great for a while. And then, being around radioactive substances begins to impair their health.
Really, when theaters come back, someone ought to program a double feature of “Radioactive” and “A Private War.” In the latter, Marie Colvin can’t sleep and keeps losing her teeth. In “Radioactive,” Marie Curie can’t sleep and coughs up blood. Both are gritty portraits of relentlessness and courage, of women who, with eyes wide open, followed their gifts, even into hell.
Pike’s own commitment is wonderful to witness. “Radioactive” is a good movie, a bit more imaginative than most (at several points, the movie takes a quick leap into the future to show the various ways radioactivity has been used, for good and for ill), but Pike makes it something to see, simply by giving it everything.
And lately, Pike seems to be giving everything. It’s come to the point that, if Rosamund Pike is in a movie, it’s at least worth a look.