My Sister’s Keeper

Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva). When Kate experiences renal failure, Anna (Abigail Breslin) defies her birthright duty to play donor and cough up a kidney. She contracts TV-spot lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin), who agrees to help her win medical emancipation. Before mom Sara (Cameron Diaz) quit work to scrutinize her daughter’s cell count, she was a lawyer herself, setting the stage for a family catharsis in the courtroom. Screenwriter Jeremy Leven and director Nick Cassavetes, who previously had a jackpot in The Notebook, reunite to adapt another heartstrings molester. From the 2004 Jodi Picoult best-seller, My Sister’s Keeper is extraordinarily explicit in showing the effects of disease and what’s involved in caring for the sick. To the degree that it represents a real aspect of human experience generally curtained out of sight, it is, in the language of movie people, a brave decision. But makeup department realism alone can’t redeem the dramatic fallacies surrounding it.