This film, based upon a best-selling novel, deals with the topical subject of organ donorship. A similar storyline was featured on television last week, in the Hallmark series, House. In this case, the storyline deals with a minor who sues her parents for ‘medical emancipation’. To explain this ‘New Age” terminology more simply, an 11 year-old girl, Anna Fitzgerald (Breslin), with the help of an epileptic lawyer, Mr Alexander (Baldwin), goes to court to fight for the right to protect her own body from a rapacious mother who would do anything to save her older sister, Kate (Vassilieva), who has suffered for years from a kind of leukemia. Anna was, in fact, conceived with that parental objective in mind as an ’in vitro’ child, engineered to be a perfect match.
If you think I have given you the complete storyline in the opening paragraph, you would be mistaken. The novel creaks with ironic reversals, most of which have been cinematically adopted: the ending, though, has been dramatically changed: the novel’s final ironic reversal was just too much for the producers to swallow on screen.
‘Tear-jerker’ defines a genre in which lumps in the throat may mutate into a squeezed tear: in this film, tears roll involuntarily, despite the rational awareness that the director jerks every emotional puppet string he can possibly manipulate. Some techniques become tedious: long visual montages, often in slow-motion, are accompanied by pure-sounding solos of obscure songs, tailor-made to fit the dramatic moment. “Don’t you go away…I’ll never find my way back home,” is one such, during a weepy visual between a manically protective mother, Sarah Fitzgerald (Diaz), and her ailing daughter during a hopeless hospital scene.
It’s unfortunate that the director chose to emphasise every possible melting moment, to pummel them with violins and folk-song homilies, while there is an important moral and sociological issue here which was very worthy of development. Permanent illness in the family is socially explosive: it can successfully destroy every family dynamic. This scenario is suggested in the film but marginalized in favour of emotionally monitoring the sick sister, who is mostly bald-headed and anemic-looking, suffering from her own brand of angst. The younger sister, Anna, despite initiating the lawsuit, is very much a secondary character in the film, which is not the case in the novel. The older brother, Jesse (Ellingson), seems lost and marginalized by the parents. Flashbacks provide the necessary backfill information for each child. Anna has endured 8 hospitalisations in her young life; the brother, whose dyslexia is definitely less important than leukemia, is shipped off to a fancy remedial school for a year against his will.
Advances in medical technology have given us the power of life over death and this creates important moral issues, too. What power should parents be allowed – to create life or to knowingly inflict pain upon an offspring, even if the objective seems noble and pure? Sarah is not an endearing character; she alienates every other member of the family at one time or another. Her complete disregard of her engineered daughter’s wishes seems callous. When Anna plaintively points out, “I am important too,” she flinches not a whit. During a poignant moment (one of many!), Kate calls her mother her “guardian angel” but many of the mother’s actions seem demonic rather than angelic.
One linking device to indicate flashbacks or fragmented movements in time is a scrapbook, made by sick sister Kate. Visually, this is scrapbooking overload, with so many photographs and decorative backdrops that it is almost 3D, but this was effective in deepening our understanding of the family. Another linking device was narrative voiceover from different members of the family, a stylistic device copied from the novel.
The film was undoubtedly long and action sagged in several places. Entire sub-plots, such as Kate’s terminally-ill boyfriend, could have been axed with no damage at all. More cut and thrust in the courtroom would have been preferable to Kate’s complaint, “Mom’s going to cut me and chop me till I’m a vegetable”, which was the major drift of the film storyline.
In the House one-hour programme, two brothers miraculously recover and the reluctant one is saved from donating his kidney, thus avoiding the forfeit of a life of basketball.

Venue: Cine 5, Ster Kinekor, Maerua Mall
Film: My Sister’s Keeper
Director: Nick Cassavetes
Screenplay: Jeremy Leven and Nick Cassavetes
Players: Cameron Diaz; Alec Baldwin; Joan Cusack; Abigail Breslin; Sofia Vassilieva; Jason Patric; Evan Ellingson
Genre: drama; tear-jerker
Rating ***½