The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017)

A Masterpiece!

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

If this is what TV movies are like in 2017, then we need more of them. This is a good, nay amazing if troubling, real-life story drawn into George C. Wolfe's film from the book of the same name by Rebecca Skloot - and it is the efforts made by Skloot (here played by Rose Byrne) to put the book together in cooperation with family members that feature in the film, albeit aided by (slightly less compelling) flashbacks to the earlier life of Henrietta Lacks - the woman whose endlessly-reproducing cancer cell-line (called "HeLa") formed the basis for a whole host of medical studies, first at Johns Hopkins University, then around the world. Henrietta is played here by Renee Goldsberry, while her daughter Deborah is brought to life in all her considerable complexity by Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey is indeed SUPERB, playing a mentally troubled, mentally ill, kind, erratic, caring, needy, wronged character with sympathy and skill. Byrne and Winfrey form the main pairing of contrasts here, and its a fine thing to behold; but sometimes the scenes are also shared by an extremely convincing Reg. E. Cathey as Deborah's brother Zakariyya. Other black actors also appear as further members of the family, and all do simply TREMENDOUS work.And if you're thinking you know this film before you see it, given that devious white scientists have wronged poor, sick, undereducated black people who only now have their rights upheld, you will only be partly right. Lacks and her family were in some ways mistreated, they were surely angry and frustrated and confused; but Deborah was too great a person to not grasp that her mother's cells had done much good in the world, and the film presents us with her visit to Johns Hopkins so many years later. There is reconciliation and healing here, if no real happy ending. There is also an electric mix of scientific and religious philosophising on what this story all means. Looking at the limited awarding of this film, and many of the comments round here, I'll confess I fail to understand what some people think film-making is for.Answer: it is for getting actors to put their hearts and souls into portraying stories like "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", and it matters not that the topic is difficult or heavy, but also somehow non-spectacular and not quite mainstream. It matters only that a truly wonderful storytelling art was put into effect, and we as an audience were taken convincingly to places we need at times to go, even if we do not especially want to.

Yes, I see all the negative reviews, but my experience was different. This movie was wonderful. Admittedly it didn't come close to covering the entire book; what movie does? The slice covered is the experience of Henrietta Lacks' children and grandchildren and their reactions as adults to the attempt to write a book about their mother's situation. Rose Byrne did a great job, as always, as the writer of the book, and Oprah was heartpoundingly good as Lacks' troubled daughter. I love that the daughter wasn't glamorous, nor powerful, but Oprah still breathed life into her and absolutely owned the screen. To me this movie animates many different ways of dealing with loss, grief, and intense resentment at unfair treatment. If you're willing to see it as a story of Lacks' personal, not scientific, legacy, I think you'll find the movie transcendent, as I did.

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. Oprah's bland perfomance makes for a film so boring and so bad that makes it the most boring drama i have ever seen. From the uninteresting plot to the terrible perfomances. (0/10)

I liked this film. I don't care about reading the book, as several reviewers recommended. Books are one form of media; film another form. I don't expect them to be the same.I thought the acting is this film was very good, in some cases excellent. Oprah Winfrey is excellent here, and although I have long been impressed with her as a media mogul, I haven't always been impressed with her acting. To me, she proves herself here. Rose Byrne as the White girl researching the story of Lacks is very effective. Courtney B. Vance -- a wonderful actor -- is wasted here. Same for Leslie Uggams, although I enjoyed seeing her. The rest of the actors, none of whom I was very familiar with (although I did recognize several), were also quite good.And yet I give this film only a "6". Why? Very simple (and I know I'm not the first to point this out). I didn't get to know much about Henrietta Lacks!!!!! The story is about Oprah Winfrey's character. The movie is still good, but the title character is almost secondary to the film. That doesn't make sense to me.So to me, to use a baseball analogy, the film get a hit to second base, but there's no home run. Worth watching, but disappointing.