My Sister's Keeper

On the way back from a recent trip, I suggested we stop and see a movie. It was the last chance we would have for awhile to watch something without having to make sure it was family-rated (for the four year old) or necessarily mainstream pop-culture (for the teenager).

The theater just happened to have a showing of My Sister's Keeper, based on the Jodi Picoult novel. My wife had loved the book and mentioned wanting to see it. I thought it would not be my kind of movie but I also thought she would enjoy watching it.

For those unfamiliar with the story the movie is based on a simple premise: how far will you go to save the life of your sick child? In this story, Kate, is diagnosed with cancer and requires a range of treatments ranging from blood transfusions to bone marrow aspirations and eventually a new kidney. The parents are not compatible matches, so they have a child that is engineered by selecting the proper sperm and egg from the mother and father to ensure that the resulting sibling will be the correct genetic match for body parts.

In other words, they had a little girl for the express purpose of having spare body parts for the sick child.

Time goes on and the little girl is loved as their own child should be but at the same time Anna has been used for stem cells, cord blood, bone marrow, blood transfusions, and when the time comes for a kidney to be transplanted, is first in line for the surgery.

For reasons that escape her mother Anna decides to hire a lawyer and sue her parents to be "medically emancipated" so she cannot be compelled to donate more body parts, thus resulting in what she knows would be her sister's death.

I didn't read the book; my wife said that the ending of the movie was different from the novel, and she didn't like some of the editing resulting from the movie.

My feeling was that the movie was based on one premise (is it ethical to have a child to use for spare parts?) and create a story by sticking that premise on a woman that had come to define her life on fighting for her daughter's life to the detriment of her son and other daughter, her husband, and her career. Her entire reason for being was keeping her daughter alive.

The movie also had a disjointed feeling as the narrative jumped not just from one person to the next, showing their perspective on the story, but also through time, showing the interaction of the family members at various stages of Kate's cancer. It wasn't a jarring feeling while watching but it was something to stop a few moments and think about so you could figure at why Kate was just in the hospital and now she's got hair.

One might think the movie was about Kate's illness and coping with the possibility of death, or it is a story of her sister's fight for medical emancipation and the right to have a say in what happens to her body. In the end, you see that it was neither. The story was the obsession of a mother doing whatever she could to save her child, obsessed to the point where she sacrificed her family and life and refused to listen to anyone or even consider for a moment that this cancer was an battle she was going to lose.

The movie was about two hours long and while it didn't seem long and boring it wasn't one of the movies where I walked out shocked at the passage of time either. The movie was more like a series of vignettes related to one another but not quite fitting seamlessly, and the time had passed as a decent popcorn movie should allow.

The only real problem that I had with this movie was that it seemed to have stretched the premise a little too much. I think the story as told in this interpretation of the novel could have been a bit shorter or had elaborated on the story more. There was no interpretation or development based on the premise so much as there was just a restatement of the premise at different points.

Overall it was a good popcorn movie with a bit of a meaty piece of food for thought for parents in the audience to think about. If you have a couple hours to kill and want to take a female significant other out to a movie this is a good choice. Just don't take a die-hard Picoult fan. I had the distinct feeling that the movie was just too different from the novel for my wife to really enjoy as much as she liked the novel.