Dir.
Nick Cassavetes, US, 2009, 109 mins
Cast: Abigail Breslin, Cameron Diaz, Jason Patric, Sofia Vassilieva, Alec Baldwin
Review by
Joyce Dundas
Director Nick Cassavetes proved he could handle extremely sensitive material with his masterly directorial touch on The Notebook , which so easily could have become a mushy tearjerker with no soul. It was a chick flick, of course, but it had some great performances and Cassavetes managed to take the unpopular subject of Alzheimer's and show the devastating effects of this overlooked condition without giving the film too much bathos.
Here he tackles My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult's bestseller, the story of a young girl born to be a donor for her older sister who is dying of leukemia, but he doesn't quite have a tight rein on Hollywood's love of the tearjerker. The film version takes the story and messes with the ending and the whole basis of the morality of using one child to keep another alive.
Abigail Breslin plays Anna Fitzgerald, whose parents use her as a donor for their sick older child, Kate (Vassilieva). As Anna grows older, she realises that life should be more than needles, bone marrow transplants and the constant pain associated with the role of being someone's spare parts.
She takes legal action against her parents (Diaz and Patric), who expect their youngest child to keep their sick daughter alive, to try to gain her own medical emancipation. This forces the family to look inward and brings all sorts of pressure on the close love, or lack of, which may exist in any family.
However, the film does not deal seriously enough with the tone of the material, though it tries hard to make us feel that it does. The overused slow-mo to show parenting and family scenes tug at heartstrings, but ultimately it all seems extremely false. Nor, does the acting do the story justice, Diaz plays it cold as the girls' mother Sara, when her character really needs the warmth that the actress is famous for. The script does not have the same resonance that the book creates. Therefore, the questions over how much love you should have as a parent for each of your children is not properly addressed and the basic lesson of how fate can overtake the best-laid plans is discarded. Fans of the book will be disappointed as will fans of good thought-provoking drama.
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