My Sister's Keeper

It’s rare that a movie comes along that can throw you into the middle of such a profound moral quandary as My Sister’s Keeper does, without it seeming horrifically manipulative and contrived. In many ways it should seem both those things, but thanks to a careful script and a premise that’s more plausible than it would be nice to believe, the film slips you into a world where there are no easy answers and the pain is palpable.

Anna (Breslin) was genetically matched before birth to be a source of spare parts for her Leukaemia stricken sister, Kate (Vassilieva). While that sounds a bit extreme, we’re not talking killing Anna, but by the age of 11 she’s given blood, donated bone marrow and stem cells and undergone painful medical procedures for the sake of her sister. Of course she’s had no choice in the matter, with the decisions made for her by her parents. However when it gets to the point where Anna is being forced to give up a kidney so that Sofia can live, she rails against the feeling she was born as an organ bank, and decides to sue her parents.

Although this could all have been melodramatic in the extreme, it isn’t. The screenplay doesn’t want heroes and villains, instead placing all of the main characters in virtually impossible moral and philosophical situations. Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric as Anna’s parents aren’t monsters treating their youngest daughter as less than human, they’re just desperately trying to save the life of their other child. It’s not that they don’t love Anna, it’s just they (particularly the mother) feel that some pain for their youngest child is worth if it allows Kate to live longer. Likewise Anna dearly loves her sister, but feels that she’s got to the point where she has to say ‘no’. No one is completely right and no one is completely wrong, with Kate the blameless and tragic centre around which her family’s problems rotate. In some ways the most interesting character is older brother Jesse, the only member of the family not directly involved in what’s going on, which perhaps makes his position the most difficult of all.

The slight problem is that because there are no easy answers to the issues raised, the movie does have to resort to some plot contrivance towards the end to rustle up a suitably weepy conclusion, but that doesn’t matter too much. After all, a dying child is an almost impossible subject to handle on screen, but My Sister’s Keeper does a surprisingly good job of never seeming cheap or tasteless.

The movie work because it earns the emotions it wrings out the audience, doing so by never forgetting that an ethical dilemma may be interesting in and of itself, but it’s the people stuck in the middle that matter. My Sister’s Keeper never loses site of the fact that this is a movie about a family under impossible circumstances, rather than a bunch of ciphers representing different moral positions.

It’s the sort of film that could have gone wrong very easily, but it’s turned out to be quietly powerful and will certainly leave you thinking (the genetically matched child isn’t a movie conceit, it’s happening out there right now). After all, how far would you go if it was your child that was dying?

Overall Verdict: A film that deserves a wider audience that it’ll get. It’s emotionally draining but you won’t mind.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac