My Sister's Keeper Review

NOTE: This review is a repost from the first Reel Money Site. It was placed here to be included in our new archives. 

My Sister's Keeper (2009)
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin, Alec Baldwin, Sofia Vassilieva, Joan Cusack
Dir: Nick Cassavetes
Written by: Cassavetes, Jeremy Leven, adapated from a novel by Jodi Picoult.

My Sister's Keeper, the latest from The Notebook director Nick Cassavettes, tries to be a drama on three levels. It tries to play the role of a hospital drama, a courtroom drama, and a family drama. It ultimately fails at all three.

Keeper tells the story of Anna Fitzgerald, played by Abigail Breslin, an 11-year old girl who was a biologically designed test tube baby, brought into the world to provide blood and marrow donations for her sister Kate (Vassilieva), who is dying of Leukemia. When Kate's kidneys go into renal failure, Anna hires a lawyer, played by Alec Baldwin, to sue her parents for medical emancipation,essentially, the right to decide what happens to her own body. Cameron Diaz plays Sara, the girls' mother, fighting for control in the struggle for her daughters' life.

Unfortunately, the film can't just stay in one place, telling one story about a possibly interesting legal drama. It wanders from point to point, adding sideplot after sideplot, until the film becomes one giant muddled mess. It relies heavily on gimmicks such as voice-overs and flashbacks, never a good move for a heavy drama, and because every other scene transition is a basic fade to black, it becomes impossible to discern what is taking place as part of the main story and what is a moment in the past. The transitions which aren't are often quick cuts in what appears to be the middle of the scene, leaving a dialouge or a moment of action seeming unfinished. Even the best movies are guilty of this type of misedit, (The Dark Knight had an amazing one) but in Keeper, it's almost continuous, and jarring each time it happens, removing the viewer from a story they were barely hanging onto in the first place.

The voiceovers here pose another problem. Quite simply, a voice over works best at the beginning and at the end of a movie. With comic book and detective stories being the exception, if you can't tell a story with what's happening on the screen, you don't have a story worth teliing. The voice-overs ere are not only constant, they are numerous. Every single character gets at least one, and often they go on forever, with absolutely nothing happening onscreen. Even Alec Baldwin's lawyer character, Cambell Alexander gets one. He also gets an ill-concieved subplot involving a disease of his own that is dealt with briefly, then removed, making no real difference to the story.

As a matter of fact, most of the film is irrelevant to the story. The girls have a brother (Evan Ellingston) whose story arc is almost completely forgettable, and a father (Jason Patric) who is allowed two or three important scenes, then shuffled away for the rest of the film. Barring the useless characters, there are also plenty of pop music montages that trod on forever and make the film seem less like a serious drama and more like a very special episode of One Tree Hill.

Most of the performances in this film fall stiff, as though Diaz and Breslin are the only ones really trying, and Breslin the only one succeeding. Even Baldwin and Cusack come across as awkward and aloof when acting alongside the young lady, though the two are great in what little courtroom scenes they get. The drama doesn't work, the characters don't connect, and the whole thing is awkward and poorly edited. For Cassavetes, whose most noteworthy film  The Notebook I truly enjoyed, you have to wonder, why even bother?

Final Total: $5. This sappy, generic tearjerker has value bin written all over it. Breslin's performance is impressive, but if you buy a movie ticket for an 11 year old girl, you've got bigger issues.