catholiclefty

Not exactly the film to choose for a fun night at the cinema, My Sister's Keeper takes an inherently depressing story - a teenager dying of cancer - and puts some other storylines on top of it, not entirely successfully. The film seems a bit aimless - starting with another sister, who had been bred specificially as a 'saviour sibling', standing up for herself and initiating a legal process to try to stop being forced into further medical procedures. After some of that, we get an extended elaboration on parts of the dying sister's past, with a boyfriend and so forth. Then we're back to conclude the legal proceedings, and move towards a reckoning of who lives and who dies and so forth. That does significantly understate the amount of time-faffing-about there is in this film though, indeed at some points I was struggling to get the chronology of certain scenes straight in my head. It would probably be easier on a second viewing, though this really isn't the sort of film you want to see twice (well, not if you're me, at least).

The true flaw at the center of the film though is that you feel the makers are trying to offer asignificant moral dilemma over the central courtcase, but rather like Gone Baby Gone (my review), there really isn't much of a moral dilemma at all, one side is clearly right and the other wrong. Or at least in my morality. (In case I need to spell it out, the child is right and the mother is wrong. The whole 'saviour sibling' thing is plainly abhorrent). The film then tries to get around this by having it all as a manufactured artifice for a different reason anyway - a twist that it is pretty easy to guess well before it comes, but avoiding the moral question entirely, which is somewhat of a cop-out. There would be nothing wrong with the motivation behind this being entirely genuine from start to finish, and would make for a sharper film. To some credit, the film does add a coda where the court case is won by the correct side, even though it is no longer relevant, so it isn't entirely troubling, but it has been sidelined from the main plot by this point.

The characters feel real enough in all their stubborn irritating ways, though there's a brother who is going off the rails who seems entirely incidental to the story, and ends up being an unfortunate distraction. He could have been chopped entirely with little effect. Still, the family interactions mostly feel authentic, with a few minor exceptions which seemed forced.

The film's main impact for me is in proving, again, that Abigail Breslin is an outstanding young actress. She's excellent here, never hitting a false note and dealing with a complex part in a competent and mature manner. The middle third of the film suffers at least in part because she's off the screen for most of it. She has a presence well beyond her years and is the heart of the film, whatever the screenplay implies. Sofia Vassilieva does a good job - I think - as the sister with cancer. I say I think because I'm not at all sure how hard it is to look miserable and dying for most of a film. She does it rather well though. Cameron Diaz plays against type as the hard-assed mother who cares about nothing but trying to make her daughter well. I felt no sympathy for her at all, but I think that's due to the screenplay than Diaz's performance. She deserved more opportunity for closure than the few seconds she gets right at the end - I'd have liked to see her deal with the collapse of her certainly a little earlier on. It's a competent performance but didn't stand out. Alec Baldwin, however, did stand out in his brief scenes, his compassion shone through very well and I wanted to see more of his righteous anger at the mother, though we had to make do with an electric couple of scenes.

In an attempt to be worthy, this too often strays into emotional manipulation, and the central story of the film suffers badly from not being the moral dilemma it is set up to be. Other than that, this is a story about death and illness, and as such isn't easy to sit through, but here it is handled reasonably well. Worth it for Abigail Breslin, if nothing else. 6 out of 10.