Honoring a woman’s big gift to science
The story of Henrietta Lacks and the long and ultimately successful campaign to identify her posthumous contributions to medical science is so emotionally compelling, it would take complete incompetence not to tell it well in a TV film.
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” the HBO film based on the book by Rebecca Skloot and airing Saturday, April 22, has been created with more than competent direction, writing and performances. It’s an emotionally powerful film that does justice to Lacks, her legacy and her family.
When Lacks died in 1951 of cervical cancer, cells from her body were preserved by doctors at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and were found to have the ability to live and multiply outside the body. Labeled HeLa (from the first two letters of the decedent’s first and last names), they have been used ever since for medical research around the world. Yet Lacks’ descendants never received any compensation, even as companies and doctors profited from breakthroughs enabled by the HeLa cells.
The HBO film tells the story
of how research by Skloot (Rose Byrne) for a book on Lacks led her to her family, including her daughter Deborah, who went by Dale. Dale is played to stunning perfection by Oprah Winfrey, who snapped up the rights to film Skloot’s book even before it was published.
Dale is a complicated and often cantankerous woman, and like other members of her family, naturally distrustful of a young white reporter asking questions about her mother. Only 2 when her mother died, Dale is desperate to know more about who her mother was, but she is given to mood swings, often certain that Skloot is looking to make a buck off Lacks’ story.
The campaign to find out what happened to Lacks takes Skloot and Dale to the tiny tobacco town of Clover, Va., where Henrietta Lacks lived, to the cemetery where she is buried in an unmarked grave, to the home of other family members, including Dale’s best friend and cousin, Sadie (Leslie Uggams). Piece by piece, the women put Lacks’ story together.
Throughout the film, written by director George C. Wolfe with Alexander Woo and Peter Landesman, moments of the past and the brief life of Lacks (Renée Elise Goldsberry) flash into view. As the film progresses, we learn more about Lacks and who she was, the revelations paralleling Dale and Skloot’s exhaustive, challenging search.
The performances are extraordinary on every level. In addition to Uggams, Goldsberry and Winfrey, the film boasts great work from Courtney B. Vance as an oily con man named Sir Lord Keenan Coefield; Rocky Carroll as Dale’s older brother, Sonny; and Reg E. Cathey as Zakariyya, Dale’s younger brother.
Byrne’s Skloot feels more like a plot convenience than a threedimensional character in the first half of the
film, but she finds her footing after she and Dale learn to fully trust each other.
Henrietta Lacks achieved a kind of immortality after her death. But Skloot’s book and, now, this gripping film adaptation will ensure that the world knows who she was.
David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle and co-host of “The Do List” every Friday morning at 6:22 and 8:22 on KQED-FM, 88.5 FM in San Francisco, 89.3 FM in Sacramento. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV