Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

Raising two sons alone in Detroit, Sonya Carson cannot read, and still makes her children read two books a week and write reports on them. Ben Carson, the worst student in his class, changes under that pressure and years later becomes a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins. At the centre of the film is the operation he performed in 1987, an attempt to separate twins joined at the head. Thomas Carter directed. Cuba Gooding Jr plays Ben Carson and Kimberly Elise plays his mother Sonya. It was made for television and shown on TNT. The source is Carson's own memoir, Gifted Hands. Watching it now cannot be separated from what came after. Carson ran for the American presidency in 2016 and then served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; none of that existed when the film was made, and the story is built entirely on the medical career. Who it is for: viewers who like real-life success stories and television drama. Who it is not for: anyone looking for complication. The film never questions its subject and treats his mother's methods as beyond argument.