Dying In Vain
My SisterNs Keeper is honest about illness, false about everything else
Eleven-year-old Anna FitzgeraldNs parents didnNt just plan for her—they customized her in utero, with the specific aim of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate.
From a 2004 Jodi Picoult best-seller, My SisterNs Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) relapses, experiencing renal failure, Anna (Abigail Breslin), after years of marrow harvesting, defies her birthright duty to play donor and cough up a kidney. She contracts TV-spot lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin, possibly the only actor here who doesnNt cry onscreen), who agrees to help her win medical emancipation. Before mom Sara (Cameron Diaz) took a solemn oath to keep Kate alive, quitting work to scrutinize her daughterNs cell count, she was a lawyer herself, setting the stage for a family catharsis in the courtroom. (The film has an odd idea of law as group therapy.)
Screenwriter Jeremy Leven and director Nick Cassavetes, who previously jackpotted with The Notebook, reunite to adapt another heartstrings molester. Afraid to jettison subplot baggage, they make space instead with corner-cutting exposition techniques—consequently, too much is done in too little depth. Key narrative information is left to voice-over. Moments of bonding that should expand characters instead compress them, as cast members in music-video montage ham “happy”—photobooth hijinks, a beach idyll, KateNs diner date with a fellow patient—to a soundtrack of Delilah After Dark requests. (ItNs interesting to contemplate that someone actually approved the inclusion of a draggy “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” cover, at a moment when the familiar lyrics could not possibly be any less applicable.)
The misty resignation is periodically sideswiped by Diaz, defiantly shrill as a woman incinerated by monomaniacal love, while the right thing to do is increasingly obvious to her husband (Jason Patric as Hunky Celt), to everyone else onscreen and to everyone in the theater. Cassavetes père might have approved. Meanwhile, Evan Ellingson, as the overlooked oldest Fitzgerald kid, is given little to do save look pained in the few digressive scenes heNs the center of, as if holding in a big third-act revelation that will erase any last trace of moral ambiguity. (HeNs always taking the bus to Sunset Boulevard and wandering around neon after-hours; I thought the twist would be that he was hustling.)
My SisterNs Keeper is extraordinarily explicit in showing the effects of disease and what is involved in caring for the sick. Screen time goes to gory hemorrhages, chemo-induced heavings and messed plastic sheets. As Kate weakens, her translucent skin darkens and discolors, and her teeth go brittle and loose. ItNs not exactly The Fly, but you donNt usually see this unblinking attention to the progress of physical decay in a PG-13 wide-release movie, and to the degree that it represents a real aspect of human experience generally curtained out of sight, it is, in the language of movie people, a brave decision. But some of the most moving agonies in films have been accomplished through the phony shorthand of sweaty brow, hand dropped limp, or a dribble of syrup from the corner of the moutH N Mdash;which is to say, such makeup-department realism alone canNt redeem the dramatic fallacies surrounding it.
Cursed with the susceptible sentimentality common to drunks and childless Hummel collectors, I was unmoved by My SisterNs Keeper. The subject is the saddest imaginable, a young girl letting go of everything—but for that to mean anything, the drama needs to suggest life beyond a scrapbook of misty water-colored memories, something to hint at Our TownNs “Oh, earth, youNre too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” This may be asking a lot of a weepie, but this much less is emotional ipecac.
My SisterNs Keeper was directed by Nick Cassavetes; written by Jeremy Leven and Cassavetes, based on the novel by Jodi Picoult; and stars Abigail Breslin, Sofia Vassilieva, Alec Baldwin and Cameron Diaz. Rated PG-13. Countywide.
