Review: My Sister’s Keeper

Cameron Diaz, Jason Patric, Abigail Breslin, Sofia Vassilieva, Alec Baldwin, Joan Cusack. Screenplay by Jeremy Leven and Nick Cassavetes, from the novel by Jodi Picoult. Directed by Nick Cassavetes. PG-13 for mature thematic content, some disturbing images, sensuality, language and brief teen drinking. 109 minutes.

* 1/2

Based on the popular novel by Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper, the story of a family in crisis over a cancer-stricken teenage daughter, is one of the most emotionally manipulative films in memory.

Uneven and unconvincing, the movie lays waste to a talented cast, managing little depth while aggressively pushing our buttons. The film exists for one reason: to make an audience weep—and it just doesn’t earn it.

Cameron Diaz stars as Sara, a mother torn between two daughters and in the middle of a highly contrived legal proceeding. Teen Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) is in the advanced stages of leukemia, which she has lived with since age 5.

Younger sister Anna (Abigail Breslin) was conceived as a potential donor, and she knows it. Why parents would reveal such a thing to a young child is one of the fundamental questions unanswered by the hollow screenplay. In the course of her short life, Anna has been subjected to donations of blood, bone marrow, tissue and cells, and she has had enough.

Petitioning a cracker-jack attorney (Alec Baldwin) to emancipate her from her parents and thus relieve her of having to donate a kidney to her dying sister, Anna creates an ethical dilemma in her household, though no one ever once sits down to discuss this situation, and the single-minded mother can’t understand why the child doesn’t want her organs harvested. Sympathetic dad (Jason Patric) is more understanding.

Attempting realism amidst the treacle, the meandering screenplay doesn’t shy away from blood and vomit as Kate degenerates, at which point dad, Anna and the trial disappear from the film for an hour or so while the film jumps back and forth in time, with actors of different ages playing the children. This shifting time structure does not allow us to see the progressive effects of the disease.

A cloying subplot regarding a romance between Kate and another patient (Thomas Dekker) is given ample screen time, and we know exactly where it is going. Then it’s back to the trial where the film’s strongest performance, from Joan Cusack as a grief-stricken judge, gives the film its very best moment, a wordless reaction in private chambers.

There is no semblance of a real family in My Sister’s Keeper beyond the cancer, which defines them. No one registers as human or real. The daughter is only interesting because of the cancer. The mother is only defined by her battle against the cancer. The younger daughter only functions as a device to drive the trial. The film doesn’t provide one habit, hobby or human trait exclusive of the crisis.

The dying daughter also isn’t interesting, and the performance of the Vassilieva is too pushy and even, at times, bizarre. Outfitted in a skin cap, she beams, smiling through tears for nearly the entire film, while everyone else gazes at her and tears up. It’s a lot to take for 109 interminable minutes.

The trial, with Sara cross-examining daughter Anna, is silly to a fault, requiring a late-act revelation from withdrawn teenage son Jesse (Evan Ellingson), which isn’t much of a surprise.

Diaz, an underrated actress who has proven on occasion she can go dark and edgy (Feeling Minnesota, Things You Can Tell Just Looking at Her), nobly trudges through this mess. But as valiant and adept as she proves at the film’s drama, she is miscast in a role that asks us to believe she has two teenagers and an eleven-year-old, as well as a former career as a high-powered attorney. When exactly did she go to law school? And with toddlers?

It is possible to make compelling films on the subject without turning predatory on the audience. As demonstrated by Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger in Carl Franklin’s One True Thing, sentiment was not required in that deeply moving, far superior film about a family dealing with the demise of its matriarch and inevitability of disease.

But director and co-screenwriter Nick Cassavetes is clearly insecure with his material. How else to explain the endless musical montages with blaring, corny songs whose lyrics spell out everything not in the screenplay? Or the many pans across laughably intricate scrapbooks (do teens even do this anymore?) of family photos?

My Sister’s Keeper is a shallow, melodramatic morass which thinks it’s a latter day Terms of Endearment. It isn’t.

- Lee Shoquist