![]() ![]() Not all of that compression is unwelcome, but more fully developed medical voices would have been welcome. But all of that information is summarized through a series of news clips and retro moments that unfold over the opening credits. The fact that Lacks’ cells stay alive and reliably divide in the lab has allowed scientists to perform thousands of important experiments - in fact, their cultivation and dissemination kick-started the biomedical industry. Wolfe, who penned the script along with Peter Landesman and Alexander Woo, did fairly major surgery to Skloot’s work. The 92-minute running time isn’t quite enough to do justice to the fascinating people and knotty ethical and medical issues Skloot outlines in her book. At various points, it simply needs a bit more room to breathe, in particular when it comes to laying out various family relationships and histories. Some trimming of the story is to be expected, but “Henrietta Lacks” could have easily been a longer film or a multi-part miniseries. As the decades rolled past Henrietta’s 1951 death, the scientists who tested and used medical information from her and other members of the Lacks family didn’t explain what they were doing, or why, with compassion or true respect. The reasons for Deborah’s anger and need for answers are not hard to understand: Her mother’s tissues were used without the family’s permission (which is standard medical policy even now). Her personality resembled her driving: At the wheel of a battered car full of papers and possessions, Deborah often careened through life leaving stunned bystanders in her wake, but she always got to her destination in one piece. Wolfe and Winfrey pay her the respect of making her into a complicated person whose perseverance in the face of her many ailments, obstacles, and anxieties was nothing short of amazing. That’s a challenging combination to pull off, but in Winfrey’s hands, the character ends up being inspirational without being insipid.ĭeborah is not a predictable or one-dimensional heroine director George C. Deborah is deeply damaged by all the family pain and loss, but she is also unstoppable. Winfrey gives heartbreaking urgency to Deborah’s desire to know more about her mother, and also to her and Skloot’s efforts to research the short and tragic life of Deborah’s sister, Elsie, who was disabled, and suffered greatly at the hands of the medical “experts” of mid-century Maryland. Along with other members of the Lacks family, she was dealt a grindingly hard hand by fate, and the mystery and misinformation surrounding the death of Henrietta only made the family’s many difficulties harder to bear. Deborah, according to Skloot, could be challenging to deal with and yet boisterous good company. (Henrietta’s cancer cells were unusually hardy, and became the source of the kind of useful cells that labs need in order to perform key biological experiments.)ĭeborah is almost the exclusive focus of the HBO movie, which is true to Skloot’s sensitive depiction of her. Winfrey is mesmerizing as Deborah Lacks, whose quest to connect with the history of her mother, who died when she was a baby, forms much of the spine of Skloot’s book. The HBO movie about this trio makes only one of the women truly memorable, but it’s worth seeing in order to witness Oprah Winfrey give one of the best performances of her career. The immensely readable book “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is ultimately the story of three extraordinary women: The title character, a Baltimore woman who died young, and whose cancer cells changed the course of scientific history her daughter Deborah, who persevered against incredible odds to find out more about her mother and Rebecca Skloot, the author of a nonfiction bestseller about both, who knit scientific history and family saga together with an inspired elegance not seen since Watson and Crick came up with the double helix. ![]()
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