Movie Review - My Sister's Keeper

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The immediate question is: who would want to watch a movie about a teenager dying from cancer?  But we watch movies about teenagers dying all the time, don’t we?  Friday The 13^th, Halloween, Nightmare On Elm Street…dead teenagers have been de rigueur in Hollywood for over thirty years.  But those deaths are meant to frighten not sadden.  Americans love to scream, not as many love to cry.  So a film like My Sister’s Keeper can be daunting.  Starring Sofia Vassilieva as Kate Fitzgerald, a sixteen –year old cancer victim, My Sister’s Keeper is the chick-flick equivalent of a slasher-film.  Only instead of giving us the unemotional treatment of the deaths of countless teenagers, we are given the hyperemotional treatment of the death of one.  If movies like Saw and Hostel are considered "torture porn" then perhaps this film will start a new wave female targeted "grief porn".

Anna (Abigail Breslin) is Kate’s younger sister.  She started life as a “designer baby” created in a laboratory to be a perfect genetic match for her leukemic sister.  During her eleven years she has provided umbilical cord blood, stem cells and bone marrow all in an attempt save her sister’s life.  Now she is being asked to donate a kidney; an act that would preclude her from living the life of a normal teenage girl.  So Anna hires an attorney she’s seen advertise on television, Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin), to sue her parents for medical emancipation.  It’s an act that seems selfish and cruel at first blush…until you see a screaming 5-year old Anna being strapped to table so they can harvest her bone marrow. 

The girls in the film (Breslin and Vassilieva) give remarkably natural and effective performances.  Neither showboats nor allows the material to descend into melodrama, as it easily could have.  Cameron Diaz, as Sara (the mother), gives a surprisingly unsympathetic performance. Having created a child for the sole purpose of spare parts, she’s become more concerned with winning than with living.  It’s a refreshingly unflinching take on a character that most films would portray as a saint.  It would be easy to champion Sara as the unwavering defender of her cancer stricken daughter…because she is.  However, Kate isn’t an only child.  And while her character isn’t exactly vilified by the film, she isn’t canonized either.  As is often the case, situations can engender sympathy even if the people in those situations might not.

Thomas Dekker gives a solid performance as Kate’s chemo-buddy Taylor.  Watching their relationship develop is the strongest element of the film.  Their connection, while joyful, takes on a unique cruelty as we realize that their first loves will probably their last.  It’s a brutal glimpse at all the things they’ll never experience.

The film uses a storytelling device that allows each member of the family to present things from their perspective.  It’s an effective mechanism that allows us to see how cancer changes more than just those that have it.  Unfortunately, as the film progresses, the filmmakers abandon this conceit in favor of a more traditional format. 

My Sister’s Keeper is an unapologetic tear-jerker.  Manipulative?  Sure.  Effective?  You know it. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Terms Of Endearment and 1 being Irreconcilable Differences, My Sister’s Keeper gets a 6.

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