'My Sister's Keeper'
By Joyce Glasser - 29/06/2009
If you fancy watching a well-acted tear jerker about a 14-year-old saintly girl dying of leukaemia and her devoted mother’s determination to save her at all costs, My Sister’s Keeper , directed by Nick Cassavettes (She’s so Lovely, The Notebook), is the movie for you. The screenplay by Jeremy Leven (The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Notebook) is based on the bestselling chick lit novel by Jodi Picoult whose other books have been made into cable television movies on the Lifetime Channel. This one would have shared their fate, but for the money poured into the crew and casting and a topical, ethical issue in the plot line (that turns out to be a bit of a con).
Cameron Diaz (in a rare straight dramatic role) stars as Sara Fitzgerald, conveniently as it happens, an attorney who gave up her career when she learned her two- year-old daughter Kate (Sophia Vassilieva from ‘Medium’) had leukaemia. Their eldest son, Jesse (Evan Ellingson) isn’t genetically compatible and so Sara and her fire-fighter husband Brian (Jason Patric) produce a designer baby, Anna (Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine) whose purpose in life is to serve as a spare parts supplier for Kate. When Anna is eleven, she visits an ambulance chasing lawyer (Alec Baldwin) she’s seen advertise on television and hires him to seek her medical emancipation from her parents. Sara comes out of retirement and appears in court against her own daughter (and if you believe that…). Something good comes out of this: the best two scenes in the movie involve Judge de Salvo (whose own daughter has died in an accident) in a terrific performance by Joan Cusack.
Just when you think, at last, there’s a story here my brain can engage with, the court case fades into the background and the film, narrated from everyone’s point of view, with endless maudlin flashbacks and silent Elvira Madigan passages of happy families, becomes Kate’s story, not Anna’s. About twenty-percent of the movie is devoted to a flash back of Kate’s relationship with an equally saintly teenage boy (Taylor Ambrose) who she meets in hospital. This sub-plot is there to squeeze tears out of a stone, as we know that this chance for true happiness and normalcy is doomed.
In addition to the messy structure, and the fact that, unlike the book, the story is really Kate’s and not Anna’s, the film glosses over several issues that I couldn’t. First, there’s the whole medical emancipation issue. There really was no case to answer. No judge would ever be able to order an eleven year old girl to undergo dangerous operations on the off chance it might prolong a sister’s life for a few more years. Moreover, without giving away the ending, why couldn’t Kate have simply told her mother the truth and saved everyone (including the blocked up court system) a lot of grief, money and time?
In addition, I couldn’t help thinking about the costs of keeping not one, but two daughters in and out of hospital for all those years (this is America). Brian might be a saintly fire fighter, but he lives like an investment banker. The intervention of his public sector medical insurance company would have messed up the story, so, conveniently, Brian has rich relatives. In fact, they must be very generous millionaires: forget the medical costs and Kate’s big private hospital room, home is still a mansion on a lake with several acres of gardens. At least the book dealt with the financial strains on the family in a more realistic manner.
Finally, the whole family and all the staff and relatives who help them are unreal people who never have a selfish thought or utter an unkind word. Even Jesse’s teenage rebellion is designed not to cause the family too much inconvenience. The film is shot by Caleb Deschanel and it’s no coincidence that he was the DOP on The Passion of the Christ. He shoots the action like it takes place in heaven with soft, bright pastel colours and never an ugly thing in sight; and Kate, like she’s already an angel there. The film is so relentlessly morbid that when Alec Baldwin’s lawyer unexpectedly collapses on the courthouse floor in an epileptic fit, some viewers around me burst out laughing. Audiences will seek comic relief where they can.