'My Sister's Keeper' high on the weepie scale
Moviegoers who enjoy a good cathartic release watching films about children afflicted with cancer will get their money's worth in Nick Cassavetes' glorified Lifetime Channel feature "My Sister's Keeper."
Young Sofia Vassilieva plays Kate, a bald cancer victim, with appropriately quivering lips, a wavering voice and huge dark pools of sympathetic pupils in her increasingly sunken eyes.
Caleb Deschanel's empathetic cameras capture Kate in near-celestial settings while the soundtrack lines up an MP-3 supply of sensitive, tone-setting songs, all topped with Aaron Zigman's appropriately downer score.
On the weepie rating scale, I'd award "My Sister's Keeper" three and a half boxes of Kleenex. It would have earned five boxes, except that Cassavetes, who directed and cowrote the screenplay with Jeremy Leven, blunts the weep factor by hamstringing his cast and allowing a compelling courtroom story to get lost in a barrage of strained, happy-family montages and unpleasant bouts of vomiting, crying, shouting and bleeding.
Kate, born with leukemia, needs constant medical attention, including transfusions and transplants. Her parents would be willing donors, but they're not good genetic matches. The solution? Kate's attorney mom Sara (Cameron Diaz, showing real dramatic grit) and firefighter dad Brian (Jason Patric) create a genetically engineered child, Anna, who can supply the things her older sister needs to stay alive.
Once Anna (now played by Abigail Breslin) grows up to be 11, she gets $700 from her older brother Jesse (Evan Ellingson) and hires an attorney named Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin, barely suppressing a cockstrutting swagger) to get her "medically emancipated."
She wants the right to her own body. She no longer wants it to be used to keep her sister alive.
Sara, who has given up her practice to take care of Kate, can't believe this, and decides to personally fight Anna's lawsuit in front of a judge (Chicago's own Joan Cusack in an extraordinarily serious mode) who lost her own daughter in a car accident.
This story has all the makings of an Oprah special. It's controversial, stimulating and executed with polished performances by the cast.
But having the main characters present their perspectives in voice-over narration (modeled after the literary device used in Jodi Picoult's 2004 best-seller) is a dramatic error, for it forces the characters to simply read us their stories instead of allowing the actors to engage us more by acting them out.
As "My Sister's Keeper" shamelessly elicits watery eyes, it doesn't allow us to know these characters very well or fully understand them.
Brian's blowup against his overbearing wife would have resonated more if we had seen her constantly undermining his feelings. (Instead, Brian shouts the reason why he's mad in two sentences.)
Brother Jesse gets a short shrift in the movie, just as he does from his preoccupied parents. Ignored, he wanders aimlessly along streets. He ogles prostitutes. He comes home late, too. That's it? That's all the acting out Jess musters from a lifetime of parental abandonment?
Breslin pumps as much personality as she can into Anna, a fairly bland and utilitarian character, leaving Vassilieva to keep our hearts and tear ducts engaged.
This she does, especially in Cassavetes' best segment, a developing romance between Kate and a handsome cancer patient (Thomas Dekker).
This is the kind of scene that Cassavetes excels at directing. After all, he gave us "The Notebook."
"My Sister's Keeper."
Rating: 2 stars
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin, Jason Patric, Alec Baldwin, Sofia Vassilieva
Directed by: Nick Cassavetes
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for teen drinking, language, sexual situations. 106 minutes.