"My Sister's Keeper" unfolds around Kate Fitzgerald, a 14-year-old girl with leukemia, but it is fundamentally about the dynamics of a family defined by her illness. Based on the best-selling 2007 novel by Jodi Picoult, it's difficult to keep the floodgates from swinging open and drenching the eyes even for a few scenes. In this way, director Nick Cassavetes (working from a screenplay copenned with Jeremy Leven) is extremely effective in building this often harrowing tale of illness and familial love. On the other hand it's hard to shake off the feeling of being manipulated, sensory-molested and finally being enraged at all diseases and accidents that affect the very young. See the film on a bad day and you're likely to sink into depression for days to come.
But Cassavetes — though sometimes he cuts it real close — never mires the story in the marshlands of maudlin. There's humor, there's irony. And befitting the film's backdrop of Southern California, the sorrow and pain and moral dilemmas are all conducted under a bright sun and brilliant blue sky, emphasizing the family's incredible strength and capacity for happiness even as we witness the disintegration of their relationships.
The 11-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin), whose in vitro birth had been "engineered" by doctors to function as a veritable organ bank for her sister, Kate (Sofia Vasselieva), is the first to voice her dissent loud and clear. Anna enlists the aid of hotshot lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin) to win "medical emancipation" from her parents who want her to donate a kidney to prolong Kate's life. Since birth, Anna had already given blood, stem cells and bone marrow — in her young life she had undergone eight major operations.