MADAME CURIE Review – ***

I was certainly aware of Madame Curie, not least because it had been nominated for multiple Oscars (as I’ll get into below), but I had never made any particular point of seeing it…until my friend Abby (a critic in her own right) announced that she was hosting a free screening of it at a local university, and not being one to pass up such an opportunity, I took advantage. And there are two things which are worth noting in the wake of seeing it.

The first is that the prestige-biopic playbook has really not changed all that much in the 75 years since Madame Curie was released. Even with a greater access to the historical record—and a corresponding greater ease of fact-checking for skeptical viewers—today’s biopics are not much less given to romanticize their subjects’ stories and to distort the facts for the sake of drama, even if the result is a more generic narrative which has relatively little resonance beyond that year’s awards season. There’s still the same propensity for stirring speeches made with swelling music in the background, the only changes being made for the sake of changes in cinematic style and public taste.

The second is how strange it is—to me, at least—that Curie’s life has yet to receive a more authoritative screen treatment. As I write this, a new film called Radioactive, directed by Marjane Satrapi and starring Rosamund Pike as Marie, will be opening Stateside in just over a month…but the reviews and the off-season release date aren’t overly promising (though I will try and see it when it comes my way). There have been a couple of other films about her, none especially noteworthy, but for whatever reason this represents Hollywood’s only stab at telling her story.

And while Madame Curie isn’t a bad film, it doesn’t really do the scope of her career justice, either. It starts around 1894, as Marie Skłowdoska (Greer Garson) is engaged in grueling studies at the Sorbonne, pursuing degrees both in physics and mathematics. Attracting the notice of a sympathetic professor, Perot (Albert Bassermann), she is assigned a project to research the magnetic properties of various steels, to be conducted in the laboratory of Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon). Pierre is initially reluctant to allow a woman scientist into his laboratory, but he is soon impressed by Curie’s genius and spirit.

Their colleague, Dr. Becquerel (Reginald Owen), shows them the results of an experiment he has been conducting to test how various minerals absorb solar energy. Most do not, but one, pitchblende, appears to give off energy of its own. This impresses both of them, but their acquaintance appears almost at an end as Marie announces her intention to return to her native Poland and teach. Pierre is aghast, and invites her to spend the weekend at his parents’ (Henry Travers and Dame May Whitty) country home. While there, he proposes to her—in highly academic terms—and she accepts.

Marie remains fascinated by the mystery of the pitchblende, and decides to analyze it on her own. She removes the uranium and other known radioactive elements from it, but these only add up to about half of the energy released by the pitchblende. Puzzling over the mystery with Pierre, he suggests testing the rest of the pitchblende, which indeed accounts for the remaining radioactivity. They realize that there is a new, still-undiscovered element within the ore which releases more energy than anything identified before, and they set upon the long and arduous path which leads them to discover radium, become world-famous, and after Pierre’s tragic early death, leaves Marie to continue their work by herself.

Despite being based on a book by Curie’s daughter Ève, Madame Curie greatly simplifies her story and reshapes it to fit the aforementioned biopic model. There’s little if any mention of polonium, the first element she discovered and named after her beloved homeland – a strange omission in light not only of the film already touching on her patriotism and Poland’s plight at the time. She won two Nobels, one in Physics in 1903 with Pierre and Becquerel, one in Chemistry in 1911 (after Pierre’s death) on her own, but the film only mentions one Nobel at an unspecified time prior to his death. Indeed, the film glosses over almost her entire career after Pierre’s death, including her work during World War I operating mobile X-ray units, opting to jump from the aftermath of his death to her giving a speech c. 1925 about all the good science has done and all the good it still can do.

I guess I can understand why the film wouldn’t mention Curie’s death, which was directly tied to her work with radioactive materials – to the degree that she was buried in a lead-lined coffin and her notebooks (and even cookbooks) are too irradiated to be directly handled. But like a lot of lesser biopics, it doesn’t do much to compensate for what it leaves out or simplifies. We might get a sense of the basic scope of Curie’s early career, her drive, and the love which reinforced her collaboration with Pierre, but for the most part it’s reduced to a story we’ve seen before.

The most successful parts of the film are set in the laboratory. The crucial sequence where the existence of radium is first hinted at, and the lengthy sequence where Marie and Pierre painstakingly process several tons of pitchblende and try every manner possible, finally hitting on a process of dissolution and crystallization, to isolate the radium (which, we’re told, takes them four years from start to finish) and in a rickety old shed no less, are quite compelling. I’ve always liked “procedure” scenes, and these are very solid examples, reminding us just how difficult it was to practice science before the advent of modern technology.

And while they’re probably not all that historically accurate, the romantic-comedy scenes between Marie and Pierre in the film’s first third are reliably charming, thanks to Garson and Pidgeon’s natural charm. Pierre sheepishly gifting Marie a copy of his new book, then just as nervously reminding her to read his inscription to her, or the scene where he wakes her up in the middle of the night to propose to her as nerdily as possible…these are quite sweet and entertaining in their way.

But when the film gets prestigious on us, when Marie gazes beatifically at the sky and whispers “Catch a star on your fingertips!,” or when Pierre speechifies about what the discovery of radium could mean for the world as the music swells on the soundtrack, the film becomes so overwrought as to border on self-parody. It’s telling that, with the seven Oscar nominations the film received, Best Screenplay wasn’t one of them; it’s just not a very well-written film and at least the Academy recognized that.

In fact, let’s consider those seven nominations. Four of them came in categories which, at the time, weren’t limited as to the number of nominees. First, there’s Sound Recording, with 12 nominees – and to be sure, the film does make some good use of sound, particularly in an early scene where Pierre’s lab assistant David le Gros (Robert Walker) whistles, slams doors, whispers to Marie (whom he’s trying to hit on), and makes various other distracting noises whilst Pierre is trying to work. Then there’s Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, which had a whopping 16 nominees; Herbert Stothart’s score is all right, but as noted above, it tends to go over the top in underlining the drama. And it’s certainly not memorable enough to merit a nomination on its own.

Then there’s Black-and-White Art Direction-Interior Decoration (these category names, Jesus), which had only six nominees. And I’ll allow that the sets were good. The halls of the Sorbonne, the Curies’ home, the ramshackle shed they extract the radium in…there’s some solid work on display here. And as for Black-and-White Cinematography (10 nominees), Joseph Ruttenberg doesn’t do anything really outstanding, but the film looks as smooth and professional as a prestige production should, and there are a few strong images, like the scene in the darkened lab where Marie and Pierre first hypothesize the existence of radium.

Then, of course, there were the nominations for Garson and Pidgeon for Best Actress and Actor. Garson, ironically, is at her best when she underplays the role, her looks of silent contemplation and desolation suggesting both great frustration and determination. At other times, she tends to chew the scenery, especially when the long-sought radium seems to have evaporated with almost no trace. Pidgeon is likewise at his best when he’s most restrained, playing Pierre as a dedicated man of science ill at ease with overt emotionalism. When he’s called upon to display anger or awe, he’s too self-conscious and wooden, coming off as more peevish than anything.

Finally there was the nomination for Best Picture (in a year of 10 nominees), and while I can’t speak authoritatively about the films of 1943, the fact that Madame Curie was nominated but Shadow of a Doubt (nominated for its writing but nothing else) wasn’t hardly looks good in retrospect. But with its seven nominations, Curie went home empty-handed, and while it was a solid box-office success, it’s now largely forgotten. And some of the problem might lie in another nomination the film didn’t receive.

Much of the publicity for Madame Curie focused not on the subject matter but on its reuniting the stars of the previous year’s Best Picture winner, Mrs. Miniver, which won Best Actress for Garson and got a nomination for Pidgeon (and also nominations for Travers and Whitty). But it also won Best Director for William Wyler, while Mervyn LeRoy’s direction for Curie was passed over. And where Wyler was one of the great Hollywood craftsmen, earning a record 12 nominations for directing and winning a record three awards for Best Picture (winning Director each time), LeRoy was just a competent studio director and producer, probably best known now for producing The Wizard of Oz and directing I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang; his only Director nomination came the previous year for Random Harvest, which also starred Garson and was coincidentally based on a novel by James Hilton, who provides the intermittent narration for Curie.

LeRoy’s direction of Curie is undistinguished; the film is competently mounted but without much style or flair, and he does little to enhance the performances (or in some cases, to rein them in). As for those performances, there are some bright spots, especially from Bassermann, Travers, and C. Aubrey Smith as Lord Kelvin, but nothing to make the film more than a modest prestigious diversion 77 years on. It’s worth noting that the film does touch upon the misogyny Marie faced during her career, showing her struggling to get the opportunities she deserves despite her obvious abilities, but scenes like the one where she seems most concerned with whether or not Pierre is proud of her tend to undermine that message, which is in any case delivered without subtlety.

Madame Curie is hardly a bad film, but the modern viewer will probably find it more worthwhile as an example of the 1940s prestige picture than as a depiction of its subject. Here’s hoping Radioactive does her a bit more justice.

Score: 66