My Sister’s Keeper takes a sharp left turn from the typical summer fun at the box-office and delivers a story laden with emotional baggage and a plot that is unavoidably audience-grabbing. From the film’s opening monologue, we learn that 11-year old Anna was designed at birth with a very specific purpose. She was born through in-vitro fertilization and used as a source for spare parts for her leukemic 16-yr. old sister Kate. So far, Anna and her parents have succeeded in keeping Kate alive who was supposed to be dead at age 5. Anna however, is starting to become fed up with the whole thing. Bright, and endearing Anna (Abigail Breslin) finds a local attorney boasting a 90% success rate (Alec Baldwin) in order to sue her parents for “medical emancipation”. In short Anna wants to be able to make her own decisions with her own body. She wants a shot at having a somewhat normal childhood and a future that won’t be riddled with medical problems brought on by her parents’ decision to use her.
Anna’s mother Sarah (Cameron Diaz) also happens to be an attorney who is not currently practicing. Her desire to move every mountain and win every battle inevitably gets in the way of her dying daughter’s wishes and Anna’s as well. The family seems to be picture-perfect if only somewhat enigmatic being that some of them are rather under-developed characters in the film.
I am afraid that many people will write off this film because they believe it to be contrived, emotionally manipulative, and too close to genre norms. They would perhaps be partially right, but to completely dismiss this film would be equally unfortunate. The script does a great job of giving us scenes that are emotionally jarring without constantly inserting dialogue that tells us what to think as an audience. Each scene is paced in such a way that just as we begin to feel we have pegged a family member down, the screen fades to black and we are given a different dose of the complexities of this family’s struggle through a different person’s perspective. The film’s “pro-life/pro-choice” themes are clear but we are not hit over the head by director Nick Cassavetes and told what to think. The younger actors in this film are the most consistently strong performances throughout. They virtually never step wrong, and carry the weight of the entire story. An incredibly strong supporting performance is offered by Joan Cusack as the judge hearing Anna’s case. Cusack plays the part of a mother who has recently lost her 12 year old daughter, with intense yet restrained emotional gusto.
I won’t deny that many of these scenes do seem to have been manufactured in a lab long before they ever got on-screen for the sole purpose of hitting us right in the tear ducts. Yes, I’m warning you, the room will get very dusty during this one, so make sure you have your Kleenex box handy. In the end, this film is meditative enough that audiences will not feel as if they are being completely spoon-fed source material to crank up their emotions. The filmmakers manage to take highly thematic material and show remarkable restraint in displaying it.
3.5/5
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