Alice Eve and Samantha Morton in Decoding Annie Parker.
Cast: Samantha Morton, Aaron Paul, Helen Hunt
Director: Steven Bernstein
Running time: 100 mins
Rating: M (sex scenes, offensive language)
Verdict: This astonishingly clumsy drama is rescued from the harshest rating only by Morton's convincing title-role performance
as a Canadian woman stricken by breast cancer.
The "decoding" refers to the work done at UC Berkeley by renowned geneticist Mary-Claire King, whose accomplishments included developing genomic sequencing to identify the stolen children in Argentina's "dirty war" and demonstrating that humans and chimpanzees are 99 per cent genetically identical.
In research that started in the 1970s and took place in the face of indifference, if not outright hostility, from a hidebound and sexist medical establishment, she established that certain types of breast cancer have a genetic component.
King would be a hell of a subject for a film, but this ain't it. Hunt is a terrific actress but here she sits at desks and frowns, or spouts banal expository dialogue in which she tells researchers stuff they already know so we can understand what's going on.
More preposterously, her team spends a lot of time tracking down families in which breast cancer has struck repeatedly, but no one even answers the multiple letters from Parker, whose mother and sister died from the disease. Indeed King and Parker don't meet until the last scene - which, inexplicably, occurs at the beginning too - when King, who has ignored her for 20 years, salutes her as "a remarkable woman".
