My Sister’s Keeper – Michael’s Take
I confess myself disappointed. Alright, I never had high hopes for “My Sister’s Keeper” in the first place, but nonetheless I sucked it up and went into the movie expecting a decent movie regardless. You could say I’m disappointed because there were moments during the movie that actually showed potential and served as windows that peeked into a better movie, but alas those moments are few and far between. For the most part, what turned me off was the fact that the screenplay seemed to value manipulating your emotions to make you cry, rather than letting the material do that naturally.
“My Sister’s Keeper”, co-written and directed by Nick Cassavetes, revolves around a suburban family whose oldest daughter Kate is in the late stages of leukemia. Abigail Breslin plays Anna Fitzgerald, the younger daughter who was conceived as a donor child, one who would provide Kate with whatever she needed from her own body. When the movie opens, Anna is 11 and she has lost the desire to help her sister, mainly because she wants to live her life like everybody else. “What if I need my kidney someday?” she asks. So, Anna goes behind her parents’ backs and approaches a famous lawyer named Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin). Anna hires Campbell, despite the fact that she’s a minor, and takes her parents to court. As you would expect, Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric) are enraged at her daughter for having doubts at this late a stage. one of the few things this film does best is portray the moral ambiguity of the situation.
Okay, let’s start with the good things. First of all: the acting. For the most part, everyone gives a strong performance and it’s clear they’re doing their best. The portraits both Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric paint of two emotionally worn-down parents is at times riveting, but the rest of the time curiously monotonous, maybe even forced. But I think the film’s best performance comes from Abigail Breslin, who is sure to be a big star when she gets older. In fact, she seems to be the only one in the entire movie who captures the emotions of her character perfectly. Even though Anna is convinced she’s doing what’s best for herself, she still can’t help but question her decision when confronted with moments of her sister’s weakness. Eventually, Anna does find herself on middle ground, but I won’t go into any more details there. The other person worth mentioning is Sofia Vassilieva, who plays luekemia-stricken Kate. Vassilieva does get the more human aspects of her character correct, but at the same time, I just felt there was something pretty vital lacking in her performance, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then there’s Alec Baldwin, who’s also good. Like I said, the acting was the film’s strongest asset.
Also, there was a subplot involving Kate falling in love with a similarly-diagnosed boy named Taylor that was admittedly sweet and was perhaps the film’s most engaging portion.
Now, I’m not criticizing “My Sister’s Keeper” just because it’s sentimental. No, I’m criticizing it because it bashes us over the head with that sentimentality to the point where we feel like we’re going to get a migraine. Director Nick Cassavetes seems to pride himself on making his audiences cry; his last two films were “The Notebook” and “John Q.” I still haven’t seen “The Notebook”, but “John Q.” was definitely a better movie than this because it found a way to balance the storytelling and sentimentality. In “My Sister’s Keeper”, the two apects are pretty uneven, and it’s very noticeable. Add on to that the fact that most of the first half of the movie is composed mostly of hammy bits of narration from the different characters describing their position in this whole affair, and you see what I mean by this film overdoing it. These narrative bits do become annoying pretty fast and they also grind the flow of the story to a halt every time one of them comes up. I do admire the writers trying to put us in the heads of each character to better understand their emotions, but for me, it just didn’t work.
Like I said before, “My Sister’s Keeper” did actually have the potential to be good, but the moment it chose to second-chair its storytelling, it began to steadily lose my interest. The best I can do is commend it for its acting and a decent subplot. But the rest of it, though…either you’ll be swept up in the tidal wave of emotion or you’ll just ride over that wave.
