Post by StevePulaski on Nov 6, 2011 10:03:15 GMT -5
Cameron Diaz and Sofia Sofia Vassilieva
Rating: ★★★½
My Sister's Keeper boasts a melancholy premise from every conceivable angle. It tells one of the saddest stories in recent memory, but is made colorful by its energetic leads who are determined to fuel the story with their charming characters. While it's truly a sad story, it is also quietly positive if you can look at its core.
The story is about a girl named Kate (Vassilieva) who is suffering from acute promyelocytic leukemia she contracted when she was an infant. Through the process of in vitro fertilization, Kate's younger sister Annie (Breslin) was created to act as an organ bank for her older sister donating blood, bone marrow, and now forced to give up one of her kidneys to keep her sister alive. Annie has had enough, and wants to convince her mother and father (Diaz and Patric) that she herself is a human being and has her own ambition of living life and not wanting to be "careful."
She winds up suing her parents for medical emancipation using a hot-shot lawyer with a 91% success-rate. He's played effectively by Alec Baldwin, who is just as good as he was in The Cooler in 2003. Throughout the film we see clips of the family earlier in life when Kate's leukemia was starting to take a toll on the entire group. Some scenes are hard to watch, some are incredibly moving, some are a minor comic relief to a story so sad.
Abigail Breslin is bound for good things later in life having acted in this and Little Miss Sunshine in 2006. She has a talent for playing positive roles and serious roles, sometimes both in the same film. Either way, she still spits the same cute girl image every time. Cameron Diaz is definitely at the height of her career playing an overprotective mother who quits her job and is trying to give her daughter every organ she needs to make it to the next day.
Director Nick Cassavetes has given this a lot more attention than his romantic film The Notebook, a film I was only so fond of. Here, he gives the film romantic scenes that resemble The Notebook, but frankly, I think they're well-crafted here. The relationship between Kate and another Cancer patient, while inevitably turning out the way you think it will, is still very believable and cute setup. That's the kind of relationship I think girls, the demographic for a film like this, want their dream-boyfriend to be like minus the whole Cancer issue.
Yet there is still one minor thing to complain about. Frequently in the film, there are musical montages of the family's life or simply them playing together at a place like the beach. The montages become so redundant and so repetitive they almost derail the film from providing more sentimental scenes. There is about six or seven total musical montages in the film, and after a while, you remember what a montage is supposed to bring; a certain emotion depending on the theme. The montages become void regardless of the theme because of their repetition.
Even during some of the saddest scenes, My Sister's Keeper proves it can tackle a hefty subject head-on without sugarcoating it. We begin to question who is life harder on; the innocent little girl who has to be robbed of much of her body or the helpless Cancer patient? Both never asked for this, but both are forced into boxes they don't want to be in and can't fit into. It's a sad state of affairs already, and I'm glad that screenwriters Jeremy Leven (also responsible for the writing in The Notebook) and Nick Cassavetes chose to avoid a certain piece of the book's ending to prevent from an even gloomier close to such a great film. My Sister's Keeper is truly a gem, one that shines through the gloomiest of times.
Starring: Abigail Breslin, Cameron Diaz, Jason Patric, Sofia Vassilieva, and Alec Baldwin. Directed by: Nick Cassavetes.