My Sister’s Keeper (**½)

Directed by: Nick Cassavetes
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Alec Baldwin, Abigail Breslin, Sofia Vassilieva, Jason Patric
Seen: August 6th 2009

**½ Out of ****

When Kate Fitzgerald (Vassilieva) was about three or four years old, her parents, Sara (Diaz) and Brian (Patric) made a pretty hard decision upon hearing their little girl had acute promyelocytic leukaemia, or cancer in short. To ensure availability of acceptable donor organs, blood, bone marrow, etc., Sara and Brian engineered a child to stand in as a suitable donor – to not risk always waiting on a transplant list for a genetic match.

But now Anna (Breslin) decides that she does not want to be an organ farm anymore – she wants her own life, and she approaches attorney Campbell Alexander (Baldwin) to assist her in becoming a medically emancipated minor. She claims this is to improve her life, to give her the ability to one day still be able to live a quality life, to be a cheerleader or play soccer, and this blows the family open wide – since Sara depends on Anna to keep Kate alive.

And here the moral issue arises, as Sara is almost blind to Anna’s issues so long as Kate gets the correct part of Anna to survive. Brian starts seeing Anna’s point as she has never really had a say in what is being done to her, but Sara keeps “manipulating” Anna to give part of herself, as she has the ability to save her sister’s life...

The film takes a long hard look at what something like this can do to a family, and what difficulty parents have in letting a child go, which makes for truly emotional material. The family is a great unit but keeping up with the stress of a life or death decision such as this is not something anyone should be held up with.

I had some issues with the film’s editing during the first half hour, the screen constantly just fading to black, staying black for a while as the next scene’s sound starts filtering in a few seconds before fading into the new scene – it actually became slightly annoying, and I’m glad it stopped soon enough. The acting struck me as sort of mechanical, keeping me firmly grounded in my criticism of the belief that if the story is good enough, the rest of the production does not have to be. Do not get me wrong here, the story is absolutely beautiful, but the execution of it strikes a discordant note.

The whole audience was teary eyed almost from the start of the film, and it is actually accomplished with almost no cinematic manipulation, while the most touching scene, to me, was the one where Kate shared a moment with her father before going to a dance with her boyfriend. My Sister’s Keeper is a good film without being a great one, but it is a beautiful story that will have almost everyone pretty emotional, I know I did not walk out of the film completely unaffected.