3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity and teen sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.26.09
Buy DVD: My Sister's Keeper
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Although My Sister's Keeper is laced with intriguing little mysteries and fueled by a thought-provoking legal issue, the big question is whether Cameron Diaz's Sara Fitzgerald is a sympathetic character ... or a monomaniacal monster.
It's a crucial issue, since it likely will determine the degree to which audiences will embrace this film.
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| Having done the unthinkable, by rebelling against her parents and refusing to participate in any more medical procedures that might prolong her older sister's life, Anna (Abigail Breslin) finally finds herself in court with her compassionate attorney, Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin). What follows will be a most unusual trial ... even more so than Anna anticipates. |
There's very little to admire about Diaz's portrait of Sara, even though considerable latitude must be granted a mother determined to do anything to save the life of a critically ill daughter.
Just what "anything" might encompass, of course, is the heart of the best-selling book by Jodi Picoult
, on which this film is based. Director/co-scripter Nick Cassavetes — working with Jeremy Leven, who adapted The Notebook
— has made a contemplative, obviously heartfelt adaptation of Picoult's book, and the film is highlighted by numerous strong, sensitive and impeccably shaded performances. Diaz's, alas, is not one of them ... which reveals my take on the question posed in the first paragraph.
Diaz simply doesn't have the acting chops for what should be a delicately balanced role. The benefit of getting to know such a character in a book is the time invested: Picoult has ample room to grant Sara Fitzgerald an opportunity to transition from well-balanced woman to a frenzied she-bear.
But we meet Sara only as the latter in this film, and — despite the numerous flashbacks Cassavetes employs — Diaz is a shrill, one-note shrike throughout. She's unpleasant, dictatorial, callous and thoroughly unpleasant, and we therefore can't sympathize with the family catastrophe that may have brought a once kinder woman to this moment. Not at all.
Even the occasional act of nobility — as when Sara shaves her head, in order to show solidarity with her bald elder daughter — emerges more as a gesture of angry spite (absolutely the wrong reading!) than compassion.
I was reminded of Jack Nicholson's equally one-sided interpretation of Jack Torrance, in Stanley Kubrick's ill-advised 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining
. If Nicholson plays the part as a deranged lunatic from the get-go — which he does — then we have no sense of a good man being converted to evil by the inhabitants of a haunted hotel. Similarly, Diaz grants us no glimpse of what must have been, at one time, a gentler woman.
