Something The Lord Made is an extraordinary movie that recounts a true story of both a medical breakthrough and racial inequality, giving both strands their due.  Made for TV by HBO, it deserves a wider audience than it originally got.  The story spans over 40 years, focussing on the inter-racial research team that designed and performed the first heart surgery.

The story opens in Nashville at the dawn of the Depression.  Young African-American Vivien Thomas (Mos Def) is laid off from his construction job, and gets a job at Vanderbilt University.  He's saving for college and plans to be a doctor, so appreciates that the job is in the lab of Dr. Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman), even though it's a custodial job.   He's supposed to keep the lab clean and take care of the research dogs, but at night he's dipping into the medical books. 

Dr. Blalock notices his interest and gives him more research-related duties, until Vivien winds up as his research assistant, often more partner than assistant.  (It's indicative of the racial usages of the time that by the end of the film you're thinking of Rickman's character as 'Doctor Blalock', while first-naming Def's character as 'Vivien'.) 

A bank failure wipes out Vivien's savings, putting college out of his reach, so he stays on as Blalock's assistant.   Blalock is researching shock, and the breakthroughs that he and Vivien make are invaluable to medical teams on the battlefields of WWII.

It's during WWII that Blalock moves to a more prestigious position, chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins.  He brings Vivien with him, stunning the medical establishment in Baltimore. 

Blalock is in many ways an admirable figure, but he's no saint.  Colorblind where Vivien is concerned (it's fun to watch him storm into the 'Colored' Men's Room to continue an argument), he's also reality blind.  He doesn't even notice until it's brought to his attention that Vivien is being paid at the much lower custodial rate rather than the research assistant rate.   He knows about Vivien's ambition to be a doctor, but Vivien is too valuable to him right where he is. 

Vivien has a family now, and they wind up getting the short end of the stick, since Vivien finds the research he is doing too interesting and too important to leave to advance his own career. 

The problem that Blalock and Vivien tackle is 'blue baby syndrome', a heart defect that prevents enough oxygen getting to the lungs.  Those with this syndrome seldom survived into childhood, most spending their short lives blue-faced and gasping in an oxygen tent. 

They are up against a medical orthodoxy that says flat out, "You can't operate on the heart - that's basic."  An orthodoxy they are determined to prove wrong.

It's interesting to watch the research thought processes in motion.  (But dog lovers be warned - this is research on dogs, and they first have to create the syndrome so they can correct it.)  The surgery requires new instruments - which are invented by Vivien.  It is Blalock, naturally, who performs the operation, but Vivien is supervising.  One wonders if Vivien might even be the better surgeon, since much of the research surgery was performed by him, but as a non-doctor he's never permitted to operate on humans.

Without being preachy, Something The Lord Made makes the point of how much talent was wasted during segregation.  Vivien Thomas' talents might not have been wasted, but he sacrificed a lot to exercise those talents and his contributions were given no recognition until much later in his life.  At the time of the surgery, the news reporting was all about Blalock and pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig (Mary Stuart Masterson). 

The look of the film is just right for the eras they are documenting, and the performances are uniformly outstanding.  I came to this movie already an Alan Rickman fan.  Now I'm a Mos Def fan as well.

This one's a keeper.



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