My Sister's Keeper

The amount of treacle in My Sister's Keeper is staggering, and the fact that the treacle becomes almost unbearable in the last few scenes ruins what could've at least been a somewhat okay dramatic piece. Sure, Nick Cassavetes' prior films (at least the ones I've seen) are pretty sentimental, but none of them sank as low as My Sister's Keeper to elicit tears. Yes, The Notebook was manipulative, but the charisma of Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling made it hard to avoid getting engrossed in the film, flawed a romance as it may be. Cassavetes' last film, Alpha Dog, had a severely heart-breaking climax that worked perfectly with the raw and gritty scenes that came prior to it, and I felt that that film was wildly underrated (it was #6 on my top 10 list for 2007). Unfortunately, his follow-up to Alpha Dog goes way over the top in its sentimentality, and the worst part about this is that, normally, when movies like these are too mawkish, it's due to mediocre performances, but this is actually a case in which the actors fare pretty well, and instead, it's the script and the pacing that tarnish everything.

At first, the narrative seems like it's heading in a perfect direction. The first scenes of My Sister's Keeper introduce us individually to each of the five members of the Fitzgerald family, which is composed of parents Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), and their three children, Jesse (Evan Ellingson), Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) and Anna (Abigail Breslin). The film goes one by one with each of these five characters, as we hear voiceovers of how each of them is coping with the fact that Kate is suffering from lymphoma. This initially promising approach falls to pieces when we start getting poorly-edited flashbacks (which is so often the result of indolence in the process of making a cinematic adaptation of a complex novel). The worst of the flashbacks comes when we're exposed to the storyline of Kate starting to date another cancer patient, Taylor (Thomas Dekker). This segment goes on for WAY too long, thus heavily detracting from what is happening in the film's present, and when we return to it, the transition is jarring. The movie also employs fade-outs for apparently no reason at certain moments, as if they were somehow supposed to help clue us into the fact that the movie is moving into "darker" territory.

One of the worst mistakes made by My Sister's Keeper is in its development of eldest son Jesse. Since the main issues of the storyline center around sisters Anna and Kate, the film makes a half-assed attempt to make it seem as though Jesse is a significant piece of the puzzle by giving us a couple of scenes in which he's out on the streets in an apparently troubled state of mind, yet the film doesn't go to any lengths to actually expose his demons. The only truly effective scene involving him in the film is the one in which he returns home late expecting to be chastised, and is then surprised by what actually happens when he arrives. His role in the obligatory big 'revelation' at the end is contrived, let alone the fact that the film tries to convince us that someone would actually be allowed to interject during a court room interrogation. By the way, that's only one of the three or four fallacies that this movie contains about what's allowed in a court room and what isn't.

Throughout the film, we're forced to listen to a soundtrack that contains what seem to be perfectly-selected songs with the purpose of tugging at the heartstrings. It's okay for a while, but during the film's climax it starts to become severely annoying. Then again, that's pretty much true of everything involving the film's final act. You know a movie like this is in trouble when the "final goodbye" scene between the mother and the dying daughter, rather than serving as the film's emotional apex, instead makes you excited about the fact that the movie's almost over.

I do want to give credit to Cameron Diaz for finally doing something different. Over the last few years, she's made it a habit of playing the stereotypical, fun-loving, crazy blonde in all the comedies she's been in, so by starring in something like this, she gets to display range that we haven't seen from her since Being John Malkovich; while her performance isn't Oscar-worthy, it's certainly refreshing to see that she isn't really a one-note performer. However, the biggest standouts are Abigail Breslin and Joan Cusack. Despite being so young, Breslin already has an Oscar nomination under her belt, and while I was disappointed with her somewhat cartoonish turn last year in Definitely, Maybe, she's in top form here, particularly in the very intense emotional moments (it just sucks that she has such terrible lines to deal with). Cusack is magnificent in the role of Judge De Salvo, particularly because her performance actually makes us overlook the movie's horribly obvious contrivance of the judge having lost a child; Cusack balances the deep pain her character is experiencing with a desire to be as objective as possible in the decisions she makes. Unfortunately, the two male characters of the family are hardly developed, which makes it difficult for either Jason Patric or Evan Ellingson to display the talent that would've been put to much better use in a better film.

I've said it a few times in other reviews, and I'll say it again: the fact that a film's plot centers around something important or sad or heart-breaking (or all three of those things) doesn't automatically make the film good. I could sit down right now and decide that I want to write a script for a movie about families who are dying of starvation in a Third World country, but if the way I construct the dramatic elements of the story is half-assed and not compelling, then it's not gonna be very good, and I certainly shouldn't be given credit simply for DECIDING to write about a devastating subject, because anyone can do that. While Cassavetes gave us what many consider to be a ravishing romance with The Notebook, and what I consider to be an extremely well-crafted cautionary tale with Alpha Dog, there's no avoiding the fact that his latest effort is little more than a syrupy exercise in extreme emotional manipulation.

4/10