Review of My Sister's Keeper (2009) by Chads — 26 Jun 2009

"My Sister's Keeper" picks up where Xiaoshuai Wang's "Zuo you" left off. The little-seen 2007 Chinese import told the story of a divorced couple(both newly married) who goes into the bedroom to forge a creature of circumstances.

Their daughter has a rare blood disease, and needs the umbilical cord blood of a sibling for survival. Was it adultery? "My Sister's Keeper" has a different ethical question: " Was it child abuse?" By harvesting the kidney of their test tube daughter to save Kate, Sara(Cameron Diaz) manipulates the family dynamics of offspring hierarchies in a way that would even give Jan Brady("Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!) pause.

Frustratingly, the film doesn't really explore the emotional truth of the sick child's ancillary victims. Played by Sofia Vassilieva, the bald gosling possesses an intrepid smile that's capable of disarming the bull**** detectors of the most jaded, obdurate cinephiles.

The manipulation works. Your water will work. She looks really, really sick. While "My Sister's Keeper" excels at tugging heartstrings, it does so somewhat dishonestly. Since the engineered child turns out to be complicit towards her mother's revitalization plans, the hard truths about how mothers and fathers parcel out love unequally to their children are never truly dealt with head on.

The court may judge Sara in a cold objective light, but the family lets her off relatively easily for loving one daughter more than the other(not to mention the son, the middle child, the Eve Plumb). "My Sister's Keeper" lacks the emotional truth in a film like Robert Redford's "Ordinary People, in which Sara has a cinematic predecessor in Beth Jenkins, the stingy(with love) mother who doesn't love her surviving son(a boating accident), played by Timothy Hutton.

Anna(Abigail Breslin) probably thinks that Sara wishes she had her sister's cancer, and she's probably right. "My Sister's Keeper" is one raw mother/daughter scene away from greatness.