My Sister's Keeper

bring along some tissues
My Sister's Keeper really hit home for me as an adult child from a family in which someone had serious ongoing health problems, a former social worker and as a cancer survivor who beat an advanced form of the disease against some mighty big odds. The casting was very well done; the cinematography and the choreography enhance the quality of the picture. The acting was very convincing, too. The plot moves along at a good pace for the first half-hour or so but after that things do slow down; they could have cut a few minutes once or twice to truly make this a taut drama. That is a disappointment.

When the action starts, we meet the members of the Fitzgerald family who endure endless emotional angst and suffering because tragically one of the Fitzgerald children, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) is very ill with cancer--yet again. Now that Kate's kidneys have failed her; Kate's life is in immediate jeopardy. We also meet Kate's sister Anna (Abigail Breslin) who was a tube baby created...

I Was Born to Be a Donor
I came in expecting a sappy melodrama and came out clutching a tear-stained movie theater napkin. "My Sister's Keeper" is a beautiful, heartfelt story that's ambitious enough to be about more than a teenager sick with cancer; it presents us with a series of moral issues that have no easy solutions. We do expect to laugh and cry (mostly the latter), but we don't expect to think--at least, not as deeply as this. Of all the issues presented in this film, the main one is an eleven-year-old girl who was engineered rather than conceived. She's a perfect genetic match to her older sister, who suffers from a rare form of leukemia and often needs spare quantities of blood, marrow, and organs to keep her alive. The younger sister believes she has rights to her own body and subsequently sues her parents. In legal terms, she files a suit to be medically emancipated.

Her name is Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Breslin), who by all accounts would be a normal girl were it not for the fact that...

Heart Wrenching
Like the stubborn curmudgeon I am, I keep thinking that with each viewing of MY SISTER'S KEEPER I will finally be able to keep the emotions this film releases at arm's length and watch the movie strictly on its merits. What an idiot I am. Having viewed this film numerous times, I am just as emotionally moved--and drained--as I was when I first saw it in the cinema--when I sat a few rows back from a distraught teen girl who sobbed hysterically during the last half hour.

Sure, there are countless movies about disease, suffering, familial conflict, and death; so why does MY SISTER'S KEEPER strike such a resolute emotional chord? For me, it has to do with the five members of the Fitzgerald family; not only are they totally believable--in their actions and interactions--but they connect with the audience, and the film respects each character enough to allow him or her to be fully vetted and explored. The plot is, quite simply, titanic: Anna (Abigail Breslin), an 11-year-old...

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