BEFORE: Oprah Winfrey carries over from "Tina" - I did tell you to keep an eye on her, right? I think after today she's going to be tied with Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan for most appearances this year. MLK and Reagan both really benefitted from my recent chain of documentaries, they both tend to appear again and again in archive footage, even if they're not the subject of the docs themselves. There's still 88 films to go of course, any of them could appear one or two more times in films that wants to reference the 1960's or the 1980's, but I'm sure Oprah's got at least one more scheduled appearance - still we'll have to wait until the close of business for 2021 to find out who's going to come out on top. Samuel L. Jackson and Donald Trump both seem to be out of the running now, but Barack Obama's still holding on to second place, behind the current three-way tie for first.
THE PLOT: 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 1950's.
AFTER: I really should pay more attention to dates - I'm off by a few days, and I usually just look at celebrity birthdays, but still, sometimes historic dates line up accidentally. It was just over 70 years ago (August 8, 1951) that Henrietta Lacks was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland (the only hospital in the area that would treat black patients) with abdominal pain. She remained hospitalized there until her death in October, but that's just the start of the story. Before that date, she'd been treated at the same hospital for cervical cancer, and treated with radium tube inserts. I'm not an expert on cancer treatments, either then or now, this seems like a questionable practice, but perhaps at the time using radium was an early form of radiation therapy? Lacks was mis-diagnosed with epidermoid carcinoma, but actually had adenocarcinoma, and again, I'm not an expert on this subject, and that's a bit of a problem when it comes to understanding what went wrong with her treatment. Aside from, you know, the fact that she had cancer and it was 1951.
This is where I sort of have to question presenting this film as a narrative with actors, rather than as a documentary - for those of us in the audience who are NOT cancer doctors or cancer patients or even medical students, it can be tough to parse out exactly what was wrong with Henrietta Lacks, what the mis-diagnosis meant, or what might have gone wrong with her treatment. The bulk of the story takes place decades later, through the eyes of a medical reporter and the descendants and family members of Henrietta Lacks. Why wasn't the story set back in 1951, when Ms. Lacks went through the events in question? We see only a few flashbacks that are set in that era, and rather questionably, we don't see the main character going to the doctor, getting treatment, or dealing with the implications, just revealing her cancer diagnosis to two family members while on top of a ferris wheel. It's an odd choice, that's what I'm saying.
BUT, on the other hand, this plays out like a medical mystery of sorts, so the subject is kept as something of a mystery herself - her own daughter was so young that even as an adult, she didn't know much about her mother, what her favorite color was, whether she was a good dancer, and so on. However, all of that is rather beside the point, given the nature of the medical experiments that came later. There may be thousands of people who died from cancer or other diseases who left small children behind - but the reporter is only interested in Henrietta because her cells lived on much longer than she did, and were instrumental in many medical breakthroughs. Again, here is where a documentary might have been able to explain WHY her cells were special, I don't think enough was done here to dumb it down for the characters involved, and therefore the audience at home.
Her cells were observed reproducing at a very high rate - at the time, human cells cultured for laboratory studies would only live for a few days, but Lack's cells could be divided several times without dying, which is why they were considered "immortal". They became known as HeLa cells, using the first two letters of her first and last names, however to protect themselves, the official word from the labs was that they came from a patient named Helen Lane, and the true identity of the donor of the immortal cells wasn't correctly known for decades. Traditionally, donors of harvested organic materials weren't compensated or credited in any way, but when you look at the medical breakthroughs that came from her donation - treatments for polio, AIDS, cancer research, gene mapping, and testing human sensitivity to many products - it calls into question how much money was made from her cells over the years, while Lacks' family struggled to survive.
Of course, there are privacy issues involved - Lacks' family wasn't told about the use of her cells - and there are ethical issues as well. If her family were to be compensated, then other people might expect payment for organ donation, and a whole Pandora's box of problems might ensue that would rock the medical research industry. But that doesn't mean what happened was fair or right. While this doesn't seem like outright abuse, not on the level of, say, the Tuskegee syphillis experiments, it still seems very hinky in not giving proper credit where it's due. And as for privacy, Lacks' family members were contacted many times by other labs offering them money for blood samples, on the off chance that their cells would carry the same characteristics. So they always suspected something was up, they just didn't quite know what it was.
Fast forward a few years, and now we're wondering why some people are hesitant to get the life-saving COVID-19 vaccine - well, maybe this is part of the reason. A case where the medical community, in a quest to do research that would benefit a large number of people, didn't take into the effects that research would have on an individual, or a small number of people. Is it any wonder people are questioning the process? I saw a bunch of research studies taking place last summer, offering money to people willing to take early versions of the COVID vaccine, and I tried to get involved, but no studies were taking place around me. Would I put my life on the line for the benefit of mankind? Sure, I was considering it, as I was only working part-time - but I can see how most people would be hesitant if all of the potential side-effects weren't exactly known. (But, now they are, so come on, all you vaccine hesitant people, what's the hold-up? By now, if the vaccines were dangerous, there would have been more people with bad reactions, and it only happens to a very, very small percentage of people, we know this.)
After the fact, Henrietta Lacks is now regarded as an unwilling participant, whose anonymous contribution was made for the greater good. The author of the book about her used the proceeds to start a foundation that has provided college tuition and medical care for Henrietta's family, which is great. Lacks has received posthumous recognition, a statue, and an honorary doctorate in public service, and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame - all of which is rather useless to her, but helps us all feel a little better about ourselves, I guess.
But I'm still questioning the narrative approach here - the acting is SO over the top, and Oprah portrays Deborah Lacks as if she's bi-polar or something, one minute she's working with the reporter, being nostalgic about her late mother, and the next moment, she's tearing up the medical documents and calling that same reporter a profiteering vulture. Did it really go down like that, or have events been heightened for dramatic effect? Rose Byrne couldn't really rein it in either, as reporter/author Rebecca Skloot, who seems prone to breakdowns and accusatory outbreaks herself. All of the other family members are given quirks or interesting backstories too, from the ex-convict to the preacher laying hands on Deborah to calm her down. It's all very unnecessary when we should be learning more about Henrietta, that's why we all showed up, isn't it?
The worst digression comes when researching the fate of Henrietta's other daughter, Elsie, who disappeared from the family at some point, and was institutionalized. It's a side-quest to find out what exactly happened to her, and as you might imagine, the fate of a teen black woman taken away to an institution in the 1950's, well, it didn't end well. Did we really need to drive home the point that the medical community wasn't kind to certain segments of society? It's just muddying the waters more at this point - so, is medical science a positive thing or not? Doctors good or doctors bad? Looked at so closely, the fate of one individual is never going to be good, long-term, so maybe should we focus on the bigger picture? No, I guess that's not going to happen.
Look, I'm willing to compromise with "hey, it's complicated" and move on with my life, but the film just doesn't want me to do that. The book this is based on is described as a graceful and moving look at the racial politics involved in medical research, but I'm just not getting that from the film, which is a bit of a mess carrying out something akin to a vendetta. And making Lacks' family members into a bunch of crazy people doesn't exactly help prove its case. Case in point, why does being covered in light from Lacks' cells make them so deliriously happy? Really, was that all they ever wanted? That seems a bit odd.
Also starring Rose Byrne (last seen in "Like a Boss"), Renée Elise Goldsberry (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Project Power"), Kyanna Simone Simpson (ditto), Reg E. Cathey (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (last seen in "Selma"), Leslie Uggams (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Reed Birney (last seen in "Morning Glory"), John Douglas Thompson (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Adriane Lenox (ditto), Roger Robinson (last seen in "The Lonely Guy"), Rocky Carroll (last seen in "The Great White Hype"), Sylvia Grace Crim, Karen Wheeling Reynolds Jaedon Godley, Jane Rumbaua (last seen in "Fantastic Four" (2015)), Byron Jennings (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Jaylon Gordon, Leon Lamar (last seen in "American Made"), John Beasley (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Andrea Frye (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Jazzy Ellis, Tinashe Kajese, Patrick R. Walker, L. Warren Young (last seen in "The Blind Side"), John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Tallulah"), Ellen Barkin (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Michael Gaston (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Kate Bond, Peter Gerety (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Tyvonna Jones, Tian Richards, Kermit Burns III (last seen in "Green Book"), Ninja N. Devoe (ditto), Lisa Arrindell, Linden Harris, Gabriel Ebert (last seen in "The Family Fang'), Sean Freeland, Jock McKissic (last seen in "Tag").
RATING: 3 out of 10 cassette tapes
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