An African-American woman becomes an unwitting pioneer for medical breakthroughs when her cells are used to create the first immortal human cell line in the early 1950s. With Rene Elise Goldsberry, Sylvia Grace Crim, Reed Birney, Karen Wheeling Reynolds. Goldsberry captures Lacks' strength and spirit through extremely fleeting flashbacks of Henrietta's life: playing with her children, dancing with her friends or entering the hospital for treatment. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Directed by George C. Lacks is played by Renée Elise Goldsberry, a Tony winner from the original Broadway cast of Hamilton. Vance stands out as Sir Lord Keenan Coefield, an smooth-talking con man who attempts to take legal and financial advantage of the family. Sadly, there is too little time to devote to Deborah's own story.Īll of the talented ensemble breathe as much life as they can into their brief moments on screen. It also tells the story of journalist Rebecca Skloot (), the woman who spent a decade researching this strange story and wrote the bestselling book on which this film is based.Sorta. Thankfully, Winfrey portrays all of Deborah's characteristics without exploiting them, including the emotional struggles of growing up without a mother, being taken advantage of by systems that she didn't understand, and suffering physical abuse after Lacks' death. Wolfe’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, premiering on HBO tomorrow night, tells Henrietta’s (Renee Elise Goldsberry) story.Sorta. The character vacillates between warm and loquacious and paranoid and schizophrenic. Having lost her mother as a baby, Deborah is deeply affected by what happened to her mother's cells.
Much of Skloot's time is spent with Deborah, brought to life by Winfrey in a grounded and heartfelt performance.
To understand why a reporter would devote so much of her time and limited financial resources to a subject requires some explanation, and the film does not provide it. Her motivations for pursuing a book that does not have a publisher are only mentioned in passing. Cells that were taken during her biopsy were then cultured and have been used in labs around the world for decades entirely without Lacks knowledge or consent. Due to its limited length, it isn't able to do any of them justice.īyrne plays Skloot as an ambitious, nervous reporter who ingratiates herself with the suspicious and guarded Lacks family, all of whom doubt her motives and question if she is actually working independently. The story of Henrietta Lacks is one of biologys darkest moments: In 1951, Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital for cervical cancer treatment. Wolfe, runs less than two hours and attempts to address all of the story's elements - scientific, medical and personal. The movie, directed and co-written by George C. Even though Lacks' cells permanently changed the medical industry, her family never benefited financially from their use. Skloot's book, which is almost 400 pages, manages to incorporate both the scientific and personal narratives that comprise the story of HeLa. It also bluntly informs the viewers that Lacks' cells were taken "without consent." Those words inspired hope that the film would go into detail about the moral and ethical issues that Lacks' story present in the medical industry. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.Starring Rose Byrne as Skloot and Oprah Winfrey as Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, the film opens with a black-and-white montage of newspaper headlines and scenes in laboratories that detail the impact the HeLa cells had on scientific research. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine of scientific discovery and faith healing and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. Made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells-taken without her knowledge in 1951-became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. this HBO Films drama tells the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African- American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa.