This is deeply tangled territory for a film to navigate. So when Skloot - a determined young white journalist who had heard of Henrietta’s magical cells in a biology course - started cold-calling the family in the late ’90s to ask questions for the book that she was hoping to write about their mother, the Lacks family was hardly quick to trust her, much less to divulge their mother’s story. The subsequent painful experiences with journalists, attorneys, and con men left the surviving members of the Lacks family angry and distrustful, wondering how corporatized medicine could make billions from the sale and usage of their mother’s cells when her children couldn’t even afford insurance or basic medical care. Losing her when they were all too young to fend for themselves, Henrietta’s children only learned of their mother’s remarkable health care legacies decades later, when her real name was finally revealed and various opportunists came sniffing around for descendants who could provide them with the backstory of the mother of modern biomedicine. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone whose family has sought medical care over the last half-century has benefitted, in one way or another, from Henrietta Lacks.īut, as both the book and the film make clear, it is also no exaggeration to say that those benefits almost completely excluded Henrietta’s own children, the ones whom she would have most wished to benefit from the billion-dollar industries that her cells helped to give birth to. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks carefully combines motifs of exclusion and inclusion as it evokes the story of a woman whose cancer cells miraculously survived her, giving birth to a biomedical industry that would go on to develop a host of new treatments - ranging from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization to AIDS cocktails and beyond - that were specifically enabled by the HeLa cells (the name taken from the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks’s names). Wolfe and HBO Films have now collaborated to bring an inevitably incomplete but still lovely, loving film version of Skloot’s complex and compelling book to the screen. Exclusion and Inclusionĭirector George C. Which is to say, in Skloot’s book too, the manifold sins of American racism have to be dealt with honestly, openly, and communally before we among the living can hope to help our ghosts finally rest in some sort of peace. In Skloot’s book too, we read about a black woman whose body was treated as a means of profit without her consent - with massive, generation-spanning consequences for her children and theirs. Now that I've seen the film, I'm inspired to go back and read the book.In her 2010 nonfiction bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot spins out another complex American ghost story that both renews and deepens several of Morrison’s central themes. When I picked up this film at the library, it was sitting right next to the book about Henrietta Lacks, so I picked the quicker alternative to learn something about the woman who's cells paved the way for once impossible cures for many diseases and medical conditions.
There's something not quite right about that to my mind. My greatest astonishment occurred when it was revealed at the end of the story that even today, a patient's consent is not required for research on human tissue obtained during medical treatment if the so called 'donor's' identity is removed. As Rebecca Sloot, she had to maintain an inquisitive approach while maintaining a sensitive accord with the diverse personalities of the Lacks family. Much of the story is really about Deborah Lacks and the journalist who researched the story, effectively portrayed by Rose Byrne. This was the only time I've seen Oprah Winfrey in an acting role, and I thought she was quite effective as Deborah Lacks, with a nice mix of emotion and gusto whenever she was moved to express her feelings. I'd have to say my viewing of the picture was worthwhile, but agree with a lot of other reviewers here that the narrative was more about the legacy of Henrietta Lacks and the effect on her family's fortunes following her death. Reviewed by classicsoncall 7 / 10 "Your cells are going to help a lot of people and make you immortal."
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