Reviews

Other reviewers have already given pretty good descriptions of characters and plot of this gentle film. But I think more attention must be paid to the character of being a midwife in this story. Claire's role in life is to usher babies from life in the womb to life as a separate being, and to help parents make the transition to parenthood. I loved the little scene where a mother is in labor, and her husband is dutifully recording the event with his cell phone. But Clair invites the husband to give up his role as spectator, saying, "I need your help. Can you just hold your wife under her hips like this." And soon the baby is born, right into the arms of the waiting father. In the same way, Beatrice calls on Claire to be her midwife as she moves through the passage from life to death. But there are other transitions in the story: Claire's own impending move to a career outside the cocoon of her maternity clinic, perhaps including a new love in her life, and the journeys of her son and his lover as they also expect a child. Other than the delivery of babies, the other transitions are still in progress when the movie ends. I like that we are shown a slice of life, but the writer/director does not try to tie up all the "loose ends" that remain in Clair's life.

I agree that the film seems rushed and busy. However, there were some wonderful scenes here. For those who did not read the book, there's a reason why the movie focused on Deborah and her family. When the author began her journey she didn't know much at all about Henrietta Lacks the person. The only way she was able to learn about Henrietta was through the family that is left behind, and then she had to rely on old memories from the older members of the family. Because this became Deborah's project, she became the lens through which Skloot learned about Henrietta.

It was too bad there is not very much science itself in the film. That might resolve some of the misperceptions, even in these reviews. Henrietta was not cloned. There was not another Henrietta born. Instead, the Hopkins researchers found that the cells from her tumor had the capacity to divide endlessly. The cells in our body do the same thing, especially when we are young and growing, but that multiplication ends when we die. The HeLa cells have become the "guinea pigs" of many research projects. Because there had been such a demand in 1950s cell biology for a cell line that would keep replicating, Hopkins offered this discovery to the world, free of charge. Hopkins did not profit from it.

But there was something transcendent about Winfree's portrayal and Deborah's understanding of the HeLa cells. Deborah really believed that they WERE Henrietta, that they were Henrietta's way of doing good in the world. Toward the end, when Deborah and her brother visit Hopkins and see the cells in their frozen chambers, and then they view these living cells through the microscope, it was as if these two people, who were so young when their mother died that they hardly knew her, now could have a reunion with Henrietta, just because they were in the presence of the cells. Don't count their experience as ignorance or naivete; I think they discovered something in those moments: their mother was present in their lives from the beginning.