Directed by Nick Cassavetes
(PG-13)
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An 11-year-old sues for medical emancipation from her parents.
My Sister’s Keeper “might as well be sponsored by Kleenex,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. To follow his ridiculously weepy The Notebook, director Nick Cassavetes opted for another tear-jerker with an anguish-inducing premise. In this adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s novel, Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin play a mother and a daughter who is conceived and genetically engineered to provide blood, organs, and bone marrow for her leukemia-stricken teenage sister (Sofia Vassilieva). When Breslin’s character is expected to give up her kidney, she hires a lawyer to medically emancipate herself from her parents. Part family melodrama and part legal thriller, the film “takes a compelling ethical dilemma and turns it into formulaic pap,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. The book paused to dwell on complex moral questions, but the film “doesn’t scratch beyond the surface.” My Sister’s Keeper is nothing but a “Lifetime-style movie” gussied up with an emo-music soundtrack and bathetic montages. “There’s a fine line between moving and manipulation,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. Cassavetes misses it by a mile.
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