Thread: HBO Special...The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Not looking for any Oprah bashing here. This is a story I'm interested in and I happen to respect Oprah Winfrey for her professional and philanthropic accomplishments, though I vehemently disagree with her theology. That said, this sounds like a very interesting story, and I'm glad its being told via film. Especially since I'm not going to read the book. :


"Oprah Winfrey is a very good actress. This is not news.

We have known this since she earned an Academy Award nomination for playing the strong-willed Sophia in The Color Purple and have been reminded again over the years via her turns in Beloved, Selma, The Butler, and the OWN series Greenleaf. But in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the HBO film based on Rebecca Skloot's best-selling nonfiction book, Winfrey delivers a performance that's on another level. It can be challenging, even when she's convincing in a film or on a series, to forget that we're watching Oprah. But as Deborah Lacks, the daughter of a woman whose endlessly generating cell lines allowed for major advancements in biomedicine, she consistently does it. Oprah Winfrey completely disappears.

Certainly, the physical transformation helps. All traces of O Magazine glamour are erased so that we can see Deborah, who walks with a pronounced limp, has hair that's closely cropped and a little gray at the temples, and whose tired eyes are only occasionally underlined with eye makeup. There's no vanity here. More important than that, though, is the way Winfrey captures Deborah's constant tidal shifts.

Deborah is eager to learn more about her late mother's life and how doctors at Johns Hopkins University used her cancer cells for research, but she's also tired of being manipulated by others. Consequently, she veers between showing warmth toward Skloot, who's played by Rose Byrne, and expressing deep suspicion of her motives. In one moment, Deborah might be chummy and ready to share any information Rebecca might need. The next, she'll suddenly snap, snatching away copies of her mother's medical records or bitterly accusing Rebecca of trying, just like the folks at Hopkins, to make a buck off her family.

Deborah has numerous, valid reasons to be mistrustful, and not just because Rebecca is white, although that's certainly a valid one, too. She's also grappling with mental-health issues: She's paranoid, anxious, prone to manic episodes from which she returns, fully lucid and calm. Winfrey leans into all those mood swings so they feel authentic rather than histrionic. If you've ever spent time around a person who's like Deborah, and I have, you know how right she gets it.

There's one scene in which Deborah has sudden flashbacks to her painful childhood and has an emotional breakdown, crying and recounting what happened through gasping breaths and wails. Winfrey is so gut-wrenching in these moments, it's as though she sliced into herself right before director George C. Wolfe said action, then let everything flow out as soon as the camera was rolling.

But here's the other remarkable thing about Winfrey's work in Henrietta Lacks: Even though her performance is the standout, it never feels like she's upstaging the actors around her. And she's surrounded by some great ones, including Reg E. Cathey, who's terrific as Deborah's equally unpredictable, sometimes explosive brother Zakariyya, and her co-star, Byrne, who has the less showy part but still believably and subtly captures the smiling, quick-to-be-kind posture of a white woman trying to prove her sincerity to the dubious members of a black family. Instead of edging these and other key characters out of the frame, as Deborah, Winfrey always meets them right in the middle."

http://www.vulture.com/2017/04/oprah...tta-lacks.html

Originally Posted by Bookman

I want to see this, but we don't get HBO. Guess I'll have to wait. It's a fascinating story.

I don't have HBO either. Guess I'll have to visit one of my friend's that have it. Convince them to watch it with bribes of food and popcorn.

Originally Posted by Susan

I'm looking forward to watching it. The HeLa cells are amazing, one of the problem with them is that they tend to contaminate other cell lines and take them over. Scientists have to be really careful with them.

Wow! That's interesting. None of my friends seem to have HBO. I'm going to call my spiritual daughter soon. I think she has every channel in the galaxy!

If not, hopefully it'll be OnDemand soon.

Originally Posted by Nikos

Not interested. I'd rather read the Bible.

GOOD!!! I'm glad!!! It will do you much good! Maybe you'll turn out to be a kinder, gentler, more compassionate human being. Please, READ, READ, READ your Bible!!