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The Oprah-led HBO film is a moving portrayal of a black family’s struggle for justice. But is being seen enough?
When a medical researcher pulls cells out of the cryo-chamber that keeps them alive, an astonished Deborah Lacks (Oprah Winfrey) cradles the vial in her hands. “You’re famous,” she whispers to the cells, blowing vapor away from their container. “Just don’t nobody know it.”
Moments later, with the laboratory lights dimmed, the researcher projects images of the cells onto a wall. Deborah and her brother, Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman (Reg E. Cathy), stand awestruck in the glow of the cells’ projection, basking in their mother’s light. It’s the closest they’ve ever come to her as adults.
Their “unknown” late mother, a Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lacks (played in the film by Renée Elise Goldsberry), died of cervical cancer when Deborah was a toddler. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the HBO adaptation of journalist Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling 2011 book, chronicles the real-life saga of Henrietta’s cells and the children they still haunt. Before the cancer killed Lacks in 1951, Johns...