Sara and Brian Fitzgerald’s life with her young son and her two year old daughter, Kate, is forever changed when they learn that Kate has leukemia. The parents’ only hope is another child to design specifically to save Kate’s life. For some, such as genetic engineering would also moral and ethical questions, for the Fitzgeralds, Sara in particular, there is no other choice.
The premise of the two-Hankies Death-daughter melodrama My Sister’s Keeper is so absurd that they take seriously proves a difficult task. The gist: 11-year-old Anna Fitzgerald was conceived for the sole purpose of a genetic match for her older sister, Kate, who has leukemia. All her life, Anna was a donor of blood, bone marrow and other necessities, and now Kate needs a kidney. But Anna has had enough of this and wants to sue her parents for medical emancipation “- the right to decide for themselves whether they can deliver what it donates sister die.
Sure, it would have worked better as a dark comedy. As a drama, it is indescribable ghoulish. The Fitzgeralds had another child not for all the normal reasons, but to serve as replacement for cancer-stricken regions daughter? That is how Anna describes, if it is to a lawyer about their rights: “I was in a bowl to spare parts for Kate.” And her lawyer says: “You’re kidding, right?” Yes, that was my reaction.
Insane when it might be, that is the premise of the film (it is based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, a regular hot button pushers), and it is frustrating that it is not entirely unlikely. Nothing about it is obviously in contradiction to science or the law. Theoretically, this could happen. I can not decide whether this makes me like it more or less.
So much I know: The movie, directed by Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) and his staff and notebook Jeremy Leven, the inconspicuous, largely created weep It sounds like it would be. Once the premise is bizarre, all of the film can do is spin the wheels and to wait for the story to play – it has a beginning and end but no middle. In the meantime we are saddled with characters that do not communicate with each other and where the script tries ineffectually to meat with back stories.
Feisty young Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin plays Anna, with Sofia Vassilieva (from Medium-TV) as a 15-year-old Kate, whose cancer has been of remission when the film begins. Seen super lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin) in his TV commercials, Anna goes to help him sue their parents for the rights to her own body. Her parents, Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), are devastated, especially Sara, can not fathom why Anna would not want to donate a kidney to her sister’s life. In fact, Anna can not see what her dying daughter Kate believe that the needs above all others.
The themes here are undeniably awkward. You have the right parents, a child to donate life saving organs to another? Was it unethical for Anna to conceive in the first place knowing they are doing it just to Kate’s life? (They have one child, Jesse, played by Evan Ellingson, but he is not close enough to be a donor.) If, as point, Sara, Anna is not old enough to decide not to donate a kidney , it is not too young to decide the other way?
But the film (and presumably the book) sidesteps a genuine examination of moral and legal quandaries, focusing instead on the shopworn family in crisis scenarios. In the story, Kate says: “I have nothing against my disease kill me. But it is killing my family, too!” There is the obligatory scene in which Sara shaves her head in solidarity with their chemo-sickened daughter, who is self-conscious about their baldness, but has apparently never heard of this new technology known as “wigs”. Sara and Brian fight because he was never at home, and they must ensure that the children themselves, yada yada. Everyone is a problem: The judge in the case (Joan Cusack) lost a daughter to a drunk driver, and the lawyer has a “helper dog” for a medical reason, he will not divulge.
All this is unnecessary, but since all the film is actually Kate takes care of the dying girls. We said that her brother, Jesse, also known by his life “, but evidence that his nose is always in short supply. In the study, Sara says Anna was quiet and evasive throughout the week, you want to show that each of us, the movie? Each character gets a turn of the film, supposedly to help us know them better, but really just lazy Screenwriting technology. (If you do not know how to show us that you and tell us.) In a scene that only one line of narration is Jesse said: “When I was at home I wondered how much effort I have to,” and It is equipped with a reception, which he secretly into the house until late into the night, so that the narrative superfluous.
Jason Patric is very little to do as the girls’ father, while Cameron Diaz, even at 36 years old, comes from immature as remarkable as her mother. It proposes a note at the top – shrilly, shrill, desperate – and it remains the whole time. But Baldwin and Cusack, in the smaller roles that are characteristic understatement, while Breslin and Vassilieva, in lines, some good work. It would be hard not to be moved by a story of two young sisters dealing with the death, no matter as maudlin or the bizarre story that surrounds them.
