Her life, carefully planned, brutally taken from her. The sister, who spent years lovingly tied to a copy of The Book of the Dead, now faces her own cruel decay. Slow-motion death sentenceīessie’s sense of urgency is aggravated by Jo’s deterioration. Rapidly becoming the national face of the cause, the youngest of the Cavallos, who once happily lived inside the joyful bubble of naivete, is engulfed by the overwhelming responsibility that now weighs on her shoulders. After losing a sister to the maladies of the chemical, and witnessing the gradual demise of the other, Bessie turns grief into obstination. Heavily relying on the strength of the original story during its first act, banking on questionable narrative devices such as the use of black and white archival footage as a way of tying the script together, the film finally finds its feet once King enters the courtroom. From the moment the story swerves to a courtroom, Radium Girls develops a sorely needed pace. Once Jo’s diagnosis of radium poisoning is confirmed by a doctor, investigations begin. Spotting a pattern in illnesses fallen upon workers of the American Radium factory, Bessie seeks legal help.
“I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.” When Jo starts experiencing odd symptoms such as falling teeth and excruciating joint pain, the life of the Cavallo family is turned upside down. While Bessie daydreams of Hollywood and making it big as an actress, her older sister, Josephine ( Abby Quinn ) employs all her energy into surpassing her work targets and earning enough to provide for her family. It is here that Radium Girls finds its starting point, with Bessie Cavallo ( Joey King ) explaining the craft to a newcomer, the quiet murmur of working girls filling the factory floor whilst radium slowly flows through their veins. For days on end, the girls lifted radium-soaked paintbrushes to their tongues, mindlessly licking the tip to give the glowing dial numbers a better finish. In the tough, saturated job market of the time, radium factories offered young girls the opportunity to earn rates way above the standard pay. Radium was the holy grail of the 20s in America.
Lavishly packed elixirs were readily fashioned and health benefits loudly announced to the population. In the United States, the material was used to provide war machinery glow in the dark clocks, which would later be mass-produced to adorn the walls of ordinary residences.
source: Juno Filmsīefore further study could be conducted on its many dangers, radium made its way out into the world as a wonder, almost miracle-inducing matter. A dangerous, extremely toxic material that was to be ultimately responsible for Marie’s – and many others – deaths. What the Curies could not predict, however, was that the luminous substance they unveiled in their precarious laboratory was the most radioactive element in nature. At the end of the 19th century, the Curies, Marie and Pierre, did precisely that as they discovered the existence of radium, a chemical element that drew a precise line between past and future. There are pivotal moments in time where history has its course drastically altered by a mix of perseverance and sheer curiosity. “Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.”
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