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MI began by expecting a sappy melodrama and ended by
clutching a tear-stained napkin. “My Sister’s Keeper” is
a beautiful, heartfelt story that’s ambitious enough to
be about more than a teenager sick with cancer; it presents
us with a series of moral issues that have no easy solutions.
We do expect to laugh and cry (mostly the latter), but we
don’t expect to think – at least, not as deeply as this.
***
Of all the issues presented in this film, the main
one is an eleven-year-old girl who was engineered rather
than conceived. She’s a perfect genetic match to her older
sister, who suffers from a rare form of leukemia and often
needs spare quantities of blood, marrow, and organs to keep
her alive. The younger sister believes she has rights to
her own body and subsequently sues her parents. In legal
terms, she files a suit to be medically emancipated. ***
Her name is Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Breslin), who by
all accounts would be a normal girl were it not for the
fact that her sister, Kate (Sophia Vassilieva), is slipping
further and further away. Their mother, Sara (Cameron Diaz),
handles the situation as best she can, having given up her
career as a lawyer to spend all her time at home. Naturally,
she only thinks about keeping her daughter alive, which
is why she has no qualms about using her other daughter’s
body for spare parts. ***
She feels, quite understandably, that subjecting Anna
to medical procedures isn’t as hard as the thought of burying
Kate. But in all those years, did she ever ask Anna how
she feels about her role? Does the fact that she’s a minor
mean she doesn’t have a say in this? Hoping to convince
her parents that she does, she appeals to Campbell Alexander
(Alec Baldwin), a defense attorney with a 91% success rate.
He takes her case for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious.
***
How does the rest of the family deal with this? How
does anyone deal with the realities of a terminal illness
in the family? Sara’s husband, a firefighter named Brian
(Jason Patric), is beginning to question the idea of conceiving
a child for medical purposes. “We went against nature,”
he solemnly muses during one of the film’s many moments
of interior dialogue (the entire family given the chance
to speak at least once). But there’s more to it than that;
it’s gotten to the point where he no longer wants to drag
Anna kicking and screaming to a hospital and hold her down
while the nurses sedate her. After all, there’s only so
much of that a father can take. ***
The middle child, their son Jesse (Evan Ellingson),
is all but ignored, and while he never rebels, his solitary
existence at dark bus stops make it obvious he’s seriously
considering it. And why not? It would be a sure fire attention
getter. Goodness knows it took his parents long enough to
realize that there was an explanation for his academic problems.
***
And what about Kate? It seems that whenever we focus
on someone’s illness, we tend to forget that there’s still
a person underneath it all. Sara is so driven to save Kate’s
life that she never pauses to consider how Kate really feels
about herself or her condition. This is understandable;
as a mother, Sara doesn’t want to go through the pain of
burying a child. ***
But at what point is it clear that there’s nothing left
to hold onto? Is there ever a time when it’s better to let
someone go, knowing it was only a matter of delaying the
inevitable? “I don’t mind the cancer killing me,” Kate says,
“but it’s killing my family.” Then again, there is the part
of her that wanted nothing more than to live the life of
a normal teenager. She should be able to go shopping, hang
out with friends, and date. Flashback sequences show her
falling in love with another cancer patient, Taylor Ambrose
(Thomas Dekker), who does whatever he can to make Kate feel
better. **
I’m usually wary of movies like this, and that’s because
they’re inherently manipulative. What makes “My Sister’s
Keeper” far better than the average tearjerker is that it
doesn’t exactly manipulate; rather, it suggests, and it
does so at a subtler, more believable level. I suppose it’s
natural to question certain scenes after the fact, but when
you’re right in the middle of it, you let it happen. It’s
hard not to given the maturity of the story, the intensity
of the performances, and the believability of the dialogue.
By the end of the film, I guarantee you there will not be
a dry eye in the house. **
Fortunately, this is a film that earns its heavy-handedness.
We’re not being forced to watch a shameless melodrama –
we’re being asked to engage in an ethical dilemma and determine
for ourselves what was done right and what wasn’t. ***
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