SOMETIMES it's hard to believe Nick Cassavetes is the son of John Cassavetes. With films like The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie and Gloria, Cassavetes' pere was renowned for grit and improvisation, but his offspring prefers gloss and exaggeration. John
Cassavetes' characters were often elliptical, desperate and pitiful, but Nick, who made The Notebook and John Q, is terribly keen on steering his actors into taking their every emotion to the outer limits. He's like the Tarantino of tears.
In short, even though this film has not been widely seen or reviewed, you know what you are going to get from Cassavetes Jr's family drama My Sister's Keeper. Even if you're not familiar with Jodi Picoult's novel on which it's based, you should prepare to have your heartstring's molested. Kate Fitzgerald (Sofia Vassilieva) has leukaemia, and has done for years, so her parents had another child, specifically intended as a genetic match to save Kate by donating supportive blood and even organs. By the age of 11, this daughter Anna (Abigail Breslin) seems to have had enough and hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to emancipate her from acting as a medical storage facility.
If Anna agrees to the transplant, she won't be able to have a physically energetic life or have children of her own but without Anna's kidney, it seems likely her older sister will die. This gives rise to many, many tears – largely from the girls' mother (Cameron Diaz) who has spent ten years trying to save Kate, at the expense of time and attention for her other two children (there's a son, Jesse) and her husband Brian (Jason Patric). In crude terms she's the villain of the piece, emotionally blackmailing the rest of her family to support Kate, for whom she shaves her head in solidarity (and it grows back incredibly quickly). Diaz is fine here, but it's hard to get a pulse for her character when she swings between anxious mother and bodysnatcher. Also, how does Anna cope with living with the parents she's suing? The film never says.
Whether you should see My Sister's Keeper depends on what you want. Maybe you want to see people being ill, bald, feeble but brave. Maybe you want a courtroom scene where the lawyer behaves in a manner unlike any other brief in a movie, or real life. And maybe you want a lachrymose soundtrack that just won't shut up (whoever thought Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was appropriate here should be made to donate a kidney of their own). However, if maybe you just want a film that tries to earn tears instead of frantically pressing buttons like a five-year-old in a lift, you're out of luck.
On general release from FridayThe full article contains 473 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
