My Sister's Keeper: a clunky cancer story

Breslin and Baldwin shine in an otherwise unsteady film

By Melissa Bobbitt
Published: June 26th, 2009 | 4:50pm

There is no plausible way of depicting a juvenile cancer patient's tale without demanding the audience to weep. Let's just establish that now: My Sister's Keeper will moisten eyes. It will make parents sick with fright to imagine their own families going through such peril. It will even paint Alec Baldwin, notorious for his checkered relationship with his real-life daughter, in an almost-Atticus Finch shade.

So why does director Nick Cassavetes' (The Notebook) project feel so disjointed then? Perhaps because the two characters devoid of vital biological parts are the only multidimensional people on the screen.

We meet the Fitzgeralds as they don masks of normalcy, despite their oldest child, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), suffering from leukemia. Matriarch Sara (Cameron Diaz), a lawyer, feels that only stone-faced tenacity will pull her brood through. Father Brian (Jason Patric) puts out structure fires for the city of Los Angeles and existential fires in his home.

And then there's 11-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin), the namesake of the film and Jodi Picoult's novel that inspired it. As she narrates, she was bred to be a living stem-cell farm for Kate, a controversy that saw Anna being harvested for platelets and marrow from infancy. Her adolescence on the horizon, she seeks emancipation of her own body, symbolically and legally, by hiring TV star attorney Campbell Alexander (Baldwin). A battle of ethics and self-realization between the child and her mother ensues.

The script, helmed by Cassavetes and Jeremy Leven, gives most reverence to Kate's struggle. True, anyone who knows someone stricken with disease shares a part of that anguish, but it is within this victim they find the most strength. Vassilieva brings a daring quietude to the role, a respite from Diaz's one-note survivalist rancor. We see her journey as not one of futility but of peace, through finding someone to relate to (Thomas Dekker as fellow patient Taylor) and celebrating life via scrapbooking.

Likewise, Breslin continues to prove herself a master of her craft. She bridges precociousness and maturity so adeptly here, it makes the adults look like the children. Possibly that was the writers' intent, but the supporting cast is really rendered callow. Heather Wahlquist as live-in aunt Kelly feels like deadweight, and dubbing Kate's medical caretaker Dr. Chance (David Thornton) seems almost crass. The Fitzgeralds' son, Jesse (Evan Ellingson), is relegated to meandering through the Hollywood streets and doing something delinquent -- the script doesn't bother to extrapolate -- and moping about. The court scenes with Joan Cusack presiding as a judge with her own familial tragedy flounder between maudlin and utterly unbelievable.

My Sister's Keeper ultimately becomes a depressing, self-reflexive allegory for what happens when cancer claims a loved one: Everything else gets lost in the shuffle.