- THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS MOVIE HBO HOW TO
- THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS MOVIE HBO MOVIE
When records are provided and medical reports, scientific papers are collected and pieces of the Lacks family history are pieced together, it is extremely taxing on Deborah and her brothers. I would be too if I went through even a quarter of what she went through. When you hear what she endured as a child and as a teenager, it’s no wonder Deborah is so angryĪnd mistrustful. Many a time in the movie, Deborah is angry and lashes out. She is simply trying to give Henrietta a voice and desperately wants to get the facts out there. Rebecca, being a white woman and not having the devastating childhood like Deborah, cannot possibly relate to what any member of the Lacks family has gone through. The family couldn’t see past that they couldn’t see the medical breakthroughs that all this enabled.ĭeborah is bo th harsh and hopeful, especially when dealing with Rebecca, who is an eager journalist with a biology degree and just wants to do the necessary research about the HeLa cells and find out who the woman was behind all the medical breakthroughs. This is a family that has had hope and dignity taken away from them as far as they are concerned. Well, what’s the saying about when something sounds too good to be true? Guess what? It usually is.
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS MOVIE HBO MOVIE
I don’t blame them one bit – a particularly compelling scene in the movie is showcased when a phony lawyer with a slick suit and impressive legal jargon tries to convince the family that they are going to sue Johns Hopkins University and get millions of dollars in damages. When watching what the Lacks family endured over the decades, it’s not surprising that the surviving members were skeptical – especially when it came to outsiders and anyone trying to find out information about the HeLa cells. It’s not without its emotional wounds: bringing up past hurts only adds to the pain and feeling of isolation, anxiety, despair and anger. Oprah plays Deborah Lacks and I have to say, she gives a pretty good performance of a woman who has suffered severely – and yet, perseveres with a dogged determination to find out all that she can about what happened to her mother, both medically and historically. It’s hard to imagine the pain and emotional/physical trauma they all suffered – and that they never knew about their mother’s cells being used and reproduced in medical labs. While this was fantastic for medicine and science, somewhere, a family had lost its’ mother and the children suffered from abuse and neglect at the hands of other relatives. The HeLa cells would divide and be used in multiple medical experiments (vaccines, research, gene maps, pharmaceuticals). They lived longer than any other cells did, in fact, they were hearty enough to multiply and survive prolonged periods of cryogenic freezing. Little did anyone know just how influential those cells would be. You see small glimpses of an unconscious Henrietta in the operating room, surrounded by doctors and then a small sample of her biopsy cells placed in a petri dish for further examination.
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS MOVIE HBO HOW TO
There wasn’t much medical knowledge about how to treat cervical cance r back in those days.
Nobody.We see small snippets of Henrietta with her children, walking around, spending time with her friends and being admitted to the Johns Hopkins Hospital for a cancerous tumor found in her uterus. I was filled with frustration and rage because nobody should be treated so cruelly.
And how tragically her life was cut short – and how glaringly different African American people were treated by the medical field back in the time of the 1950s. The movie uses events from the time that Rebecca reaches out to the Lacks family and also flashbacks, where we see Henrietta Lacks as a real human being, who had a family, friends, feelings and dreams for her children. Nrietta Lacks, her family or the enormous contribution she made posthumously to medicine and science, then I suggest watching this movie, because it will be made clearer to you just how significant this woman was. It is not a feel-good story – rather it is one of a long, painful journey of some sort of redemption on the part of the medical industry and one of painful understanding for the family, mainly Deborah. If you never heard of He This movie is meant to explore all the good that Henrietta’s cell line did for medicine and science from that day forward and yet it also explores the depression and heartache that her children experienced for decades. Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne star as Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter and Rebecca Skloot, the journalist, in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Watching something about a deceased parent, the pain of loss, the lacking of vital information and family heartache is never an easy film to explore.
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