At a time when Hollywood can't have enough of romantic comedies, extreme action and sci-fi adventure comes a family drama that's both powerful and rewarding.
Part of My Sister's Keeper is about the ethics that often involve issues of life and death. But for much of it, it is simply a compelling story of the Fitzgerald family, of the things that hold them together and the issues that make them fall apart. The movie sucks you into their lives.

Film: My Sister's Keeper (Drama)
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin, Alec Baldwin, Jason Patric
Director: Nick Cassavetes
Duration: About one hour and 45 minutes
Critic Rating:

The story is centred around two sisters -- Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) and Anna (Abigail Breslin). Their lives are not entirely their own. Kate has leukaemia and Anna was procreated by parents (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric) to keep her elder sister alive. Kate loves her sister madly. But when it comes to donating her kidney, she refuses and goes to a lawyer for medical emancipation.

It is a far more complicated affair but the beauty of My Sister's Keeper lies in the way director Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) handles his material fashioned from Jodi Picoult's novel. Wonderfully edited, the movie moves back and forth in time but never loses narrative focus. It helps that the movie has some wonderful soundtrack that articulate the mood of its strategic moments.

The key characters stand out: Sarah (Cameron Diaz), the strong and opinionted mother who's too blinded by the idea of prolonging her daughter's life to see the big picture, Brian (Jason Patric), the fireman father who has the wisdom and the heart to see what's going wrong. So do Kate and Anna - who follow the voices of their hearts in their own way. Even the minor characters -- the attorney and the judge -- are wonderfully etched.

Two scenes will long stay in memory. One, where love happens in the time of chemotherapy as Kate falls for a young patient undergoing treatment. The desire to bond and seek every form of pleasure at the time of dying is both touching and tear-drawing. Two, when the family takes Kate, by then in an advanced stage of the disease, to the beach. Those movie minutes are touched by magic.

The beauty of My Sister's Keeper is that despite all the talk of death, it never feels morbid, even heavy. "There's no shame in dying," says the judge, at one point. And we agree with her.


Courtesy : timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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