Movie Review - My Sister's Keeper (2009)

Starring Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin, Alec Baldwin, Jason Patric, Sofia Vassilieva, and Joan Cusack
Written by Jeremy Leven and Nick Cassavetes
Directed by Nick Cassavetes

I wasn't expecting a single thing from this flick and it definitely turned out to be a touching summer surprise.

Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Diaz and Patric) are a young couple with a daughter, Kate (Vassilieva), who is diagnosed with leukemia. Faced with no solutions, a doctor recommends that they try an experimental technique where they create a test tube baby whose blood marrow, blood, and organs would be an exact match for Kate. Cut to eleven years later and the biologically "created" daughter, Anna (Breslin), is seemingly fed up with her parents' insistence to use her to help her sister, and decides to attempt to medically emancipate herself from her family. You can imagine, that doesn't sit too well with her parents since Anna's refusal will, without fail, cause Kate's death.

I had an extended debate after this film with someone and I'm not going to rehash it here, but it kind of (sort of) has to do with this: Yes...it does appear that Diaz loves Kate more than her other two kids (at the very least, she at least focuses much more on Kate than her other two children)...but it's out of desperation, I think, more than anything else. Does that make her a bad mother? One could make that argument. I'm not a parent, but I would imagine it would be incredibly difficult to watch one of your children suffer, and I would imagine one would do whatever necessary to save one's child. Diaz is not a perfect mother, in that doing what is necessary to save Kate could harm Anna, but I'm not sold on the fact that she's a "bad" mother because of this. Is she a confused mother? Yes. Is she wrong? One could argue that. But I do believe that she believes she is doing the best job she can as a mother. She feels that she needs to be strong and forceful in order to save her weak and frail daughter. She is faced with a situation that no one would want to be in.

Enough of the "debate" for the moment, let's discuss the rest of the movie. The flick really shines whenever it focuses on the dying Kate. There is a wonderful performance here from Sofia Vassilieva, who I had never heard of before. She is actually top-notch in this flick -- definitely one of the best supporting performances I've seen in a film this year. There is a beautiful romance between Kate and Jesse, a fellow cancer patient. Their scenes were incredibly touching and really (for lack of a better word) perfect. These scenes were actually some of my favorite moments I've seen in a theater this year (they were that good). The tone was spot-on in this portion of the film that I wish the rest of the movie could've stepped up to the plate a little more.

Diaz is actually (shockingly) quite good. I've never really seen her in a meaty role and while there were certainly times I felt she couldn't handle the pathos needed to make her character really shine, I was moderately impressed (although that is because I wasn't expecting much). I was actually most disappointed in the overrated Abigail Breslin -- sorry, she's simply not a great actress -- and Alec Baldwin who, as Anna's lawyer, was simply a caricature of a "as-seen-on-tv" legal guy.

The movie's not perfect story-wise -- the father and son have seriously underdeveloped roles. There are a few scenes with the son running away from home that are never really explained nor were they necessary. And director Cassavetes employs many silly fade-to-blacks between scenes that literally made me laugh (at the beginning, these fades were happening seemingly every three minutes -- OVERKILL!!!).

Still, despite the faults, I thought it was quite a good little flick. I would absolutely recommend it, based solely on Sofia Vassilieva's performance and the fact that it does make you question what you would do as a parent placed in the situation that Kate's folks were in. I gotta be honest...I might've done what they did.

The RyMickey Rating: B