My Sister’s Keeper is one of the most confused films of the year, which should come as a surprise to no one. After all, there are few directors and casts capable of approaching Jodi Picoult’s novel about childhood leukemia, “test-tube” babies, organ harvesting and the fraught family dynamics which inevitably result.
The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes is certainly not one of them.
At first glance, Cassavetes appears intent on capturing the fleeting, honest, pure moments enjoyed by the Fitzgerald family. Reels of grainy, warm home videos and treasured pictures flash across the pages of a book as 11-year-old Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Breslin, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl) relates how her parents, Brian (Jason Patric, Downloading Nancy) and Sara (Cameron Diaz, What Happens in Vegas) conceived her to provide a perfect genetic match and set of organs to donate to her leukemia-stricken sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva, Day Zero).
The modus operandi is for the viewer to achieve an emotional proximity to the family, to overlook the rather disturbing acts committed by this beautiful, funny, all-American family and feel simply torn when Anna sues her parents for medical emancipation. Yet the structure and aesthetics of the film are conceived in such an odd and porous manner that the momentum built for the inevitable big cry at the conclusion dissipates.
It is quite brave and altogether sound to reveal such an intricate array of conflicts in a non-linear fashion, but the jarring cuts to and from funny and chilling moments tire. A montage of Kate and Anna literally dancing among a sea of bubbles in bright sunlight quickly morphs into a shot of Kate coughing up blood. A spirited dinner table discussion becomes a graphic discovery of Kate’s nosebleeds.
It escapes, then, Cassavetes and co-screenwriter Jeremy Leven’s (The Notebook) notice that the wide spectrum of human emotions allows for large swaths between tears and belly laughs.
The writers also make the mistake of utterly shrinking away from the challenges of adapting a popular, successful novel. Instead of having a go at translating prose to screen with the techniques of cinema, they simply stick each of the stars in a sound booth and let them explain how they’re feeling and why exactly they’re feeling that way.
Each voice-over feels increasingly like a pilfered segment from a star-studded audiobook of the novel. Nothing terribly important occurs on the screen during these narrations except a helpful subtitle informing the viewer of whose dispassionate voice is musing about death at the moment. The images are strangled by the sounds in this case and Keeper never truly stands, propping itself up on the text instead.
Then, there is the related issue of a different set of sounds holding back the vision, namely the selections from what is presumably Cassavetes’ iPod, which erratically pop up and commandeer a montage. Numbers from the awful (James Blunt) to the sublime (Jeff Buckley) are inorganically fused with the action at will.
The poor actors are muzzled and helpless at key turns (even the climax of the film isn’t immune) due to the innumerable slow motion-montages over either a mournful piano or a melancholy acoustic guitar ballad. To achieve an approximation of this, the viewer must watch the concluding sequence of every episode of House on a loop with intermittent plot and dialogue thrown in.
As intimate as the home movies, the Polaroids and the scrapbooks of the Fitzgeralds frequently displayed are, the actual scenes are just as distancing due to the awful lighting. Cassavetes and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (Killshot) botch this most fundamental of tasks by engulfing the frame in soft, glowing light. Each character’s face becomes so fuzzy and over-illuminated that the production team of All My Children or Days of Our Lives would no doubt heartily approve.
More casual viewers will simply be puzzled by the casting of Diaz as Sara. The role is quite hefty, becoming even more trying when Sara, a former attorney, defends herself against Anna’s lawsuit and argues Anna cannot say no to kidney donation due to her age. The courtroom sequence is precarious and, if played wrong, could topple Keeper over into absurdity as a mother cross-examines her own daughter in court over the rights to her preteen kidneys.
Diaz tears up a bit, glares a lot and raises her voice but never hits any notes of real edge. She looks and acts like a woman dressing up as a lawyer for the day and is petulant and hectoring at best. Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin (30 Rock), pitted against Diaz as Campbell Alexander, a mega lawyer defending Anna’s right to her own body, steals the scene with his hushed tones.
Sure, all the cancer and the loving will make you cry, just like all the war and the loving in The Notebook did – but it definitely will not make you think. There isn’t much room for the Philosophy of Bioethics when James Blunt is singing and a former Charlie’s Angel is looking worried.
Vmain13@umd.edu
RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars
