My Sister’s Keeper observes a family that is going through the throes of the most impossible of situations and faced with the most impossible of decisions and approaches it from all angles, never taking sides, never judging; just patiently watching from the sidelines, observing how even the strongest of humans can crack and crumble under the pain and pressure of life’s natural course. If the film had any opinion on how we should feel about it, this would be a soggy Hallmark pleasantry. Under the tender hands of Nick Cassavetes it is at once enchanting and heartbreaking in equal measures.The film, based on a popular book by Jodi Picoult (unread by me), tells the story of the Fitzgerald family. When eldest daughter Kate is diagnosed with an acute form of leukemia at a young age, mother Sara (Cameron Diaz) and father Brain (Jason Patric) opt to have Anna, a test-tube baby, genetically modified so that she will be a perfect match to Kate to lend her all of the parts she needs to become better without the risk of taking from an unrelated donor.
However, now grown, with Kate in remission and in desperate need of a kidney, the eleven-year-old Anna decides that she doesn’t want to go through with the operation, wanting to live a full life, devoid of the risks of living with one kidney and tired of the constant pain and potential complications of surgery, decides to sue her parents for medical emancipation. It’s her body and she will decide how it is to be used.
Enraged is Sara, a headstrong woman and determined mother who loves her daughter but is blinded by the desire to do all in her power to ensure the recovery of her other one. She believes that Anna is too young to have control over her body and cannot possibly grasp the enormity and significance of saving Kate’s life, but nor can she understand the enormity and significance of the sacrifice Anna must make in order to protect her sister, potentially cutting her life short in order to extend another’s. But what if the operation is a failure, the body rejecting the new organ, Anna’s lifespan is cut short without reward for her sacrifice?
But what if it would have worked and they don’t try? Can Sara be blamed for her determination to exhaust every option in order to see that Kate lives the life everyone deserves: to grow and mature, to love and be heartbroken, to laugh and cry into the days of old age and to fade away in time instead of being forced into early eviction? It’s not that Sara see’s Anna as spare parts, but she is more than just another daughter. She is the one last desperate hope that stands between life and standing graveside burying her sister.
More understanding is Brain who, as played by Patric in a remarkable performance considering how rarely he is allowed to play vulnerable men, knows that his children must make their own decisions and respects that. Brain is a man who accepts what fate has dealt and wants simply to make the most out of what they have. Of course he wants to save his daughter, but not at the expense of his other one, knowing that to force Anna into something she doesn’t want will result in her growing up with resentment. Whether or not dad agrees with his daughter is irrelevant, he supports her right to that decision. Isn’t that what dads are for?
In the midst of all this is Kate who, in the turmoil, no one ever really stops to ask how she feels about the matter and the film’s best scene goes to her as she reflects on the events of her life and apologizes to everyone in her family in voice-over for the hassle her sickness has caused them. She, unlike her mother, is content with death because she understands it is in the hand that the universe has dealt her and even if more procedures were undertaken, science offers no firm guarantees as she finds out within the romance she develops with Taylor in the film’s most tender subplot, a fellow cancer patient who says he isn’t afraid of death because without it he would have never met her, and again the contradictions require some thought: death is a pretty steep price to pay for love , is it not?
What Cassavetes understands here is that My Sister’s Keeper is not a story about cancer, but rather a collection of episodes: a psychological study in behavior that sees how its characters behave when placed under the immense pressures and stresses of a situation that’s outcome is completely out of their control. The film stands and observes, understanding every character and trying to show the cause of their behavior, never casting scorn or approving of the actions of any lone member of the Fitzgerald family and raising innumerable questions of the frail nature of life in the process.
So is My Sister’s Keeper an allegory about the debate between pro-life and pro-choice? Maybe: if that’s how one decides to read it there is certainly enough room allotted for such interpretations. I however think it must simpler and more profound than that. It’s a film that brings into clear and precise focus that we are all living in rented vessels, getting by on borrowed time. That life is a nonstop collection of contradictions, of opposing paths that, depending on how one chooses can lead to either joy or regret. There are no absolutes in life and no guarantees, only possibilities proceeded by question marks. Everyone has the power to choose how to live their life, but what that life throws in your path is completely out of human control and all we can hope for, as Michael Cunningham once wrote in one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever committed to page, is an hour here and an hour there of goodness as consolation, under the adverse knowledge that they will be followed by others much harder and more painful.*
If the film has one flaw (and it has at least two), it’s the business of the courtroom. Having Anna sue her parents is the device of a plot that is not content enough to get itself from point A to B without something pushing it along. Think of how powerful the final revelation would have been had it not been achieved through such means and how much more affecting the story would have been had it unfolded on its own terms. My Sister’s Keeper tells a story that is powerful, uplifting, heartbreaking and completely absorbing on its own account. How unfortunate it is that its author felt that it needed such a device in order to get its point across.
*In order to appease any potential interest, here is the complete quote from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: "We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep- it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."
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