MOVIE REVIEW: My Sister’s Keeper (2009)
Maybe twice a year, I do a deep-dive into Netflix just to see what’s out there and what’s interesting. Perhaps it was the phrase that relates to the old biblical story of Cain and Abel, where the phrase “my brother’s keeper” originates that caught my attention, or the fact that I’ve randomly been watching some old Cameron Diaz movies lately, or maybe it was all because of the ethical discussion from the trailer, but for some reason, My Sister’s Keeper from 2009 piqued my interest before it left Netflix and I had to watch it immediately. General plot spoilers, but the biggest plot details and the twist are in the Spoiler Zone at the bottom.
This movie is, on the surface, about an 11-year-old girl named Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Breslin) who is trying to legally bar her parents from forcing her to donate any more of her body to her leukemic sister, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva). However, deeper beneath, this story is actually about grief and death, and what not coming to terms with those things can do to people and families. In this movie, Sara Fitzgerald (the mother, played by Diaz) has dedicated her life to keeping Kate healthy after her diagnosis, even going so far as to genetically engineer Anna to make sure they always had a donor to supply blood, marrow, and eventually even organs to Kate. Anna’s brother, Jesse (Evan Ellingson) takes her to see a television lawyer, Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin), for this medical emancipation, when things really get going.
The movie regularly flashes back to different moments in Kate’s life: her youth as a happy child with her baby brother, her diagnosis, treatments, finding love with another young cancer patient, going to hospital prom, a grief-ridden suicide attempt stopped by Anna, and so on. We also see moments from the rest of her family’s life, like her brother Jesse’s dyslexia going unnoticed for years because all of the attention was always on Kate’s health and needs. The movie has scenes from the whole family’s perspectives that add to the emotional complexity of the circumstances.
Generally speaking, I have a love-hate relationship with movies that cover this sort of youth trauma/illness, but it’s the ones that are very distinctly made for teenagers that I hate, because they’re always some sort of weird, trauma-made-beautiful stories that often seem to glorify things that have no business being glorified (maybe someday I’ll write about how much I hated The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but that might require me to actually watch it again). The teenager movie that My Sister’s Keeper brought to mind was The Fault in Our Stars, which I hated for that annoying teenager drama, despite the fact that the story still made me cry a whole bunch (the concept of different types of infinities was actually quite great). The connection here is teenagers with cancer, though I think My Sister’s Keeper does a better job of connecting to people of all ages, not just the teens in question. Perhaps it’s because the story is actually not that much about Anna or even Kate, but the whole family as a unit.
Let’s look at the characters for a moment, because I found them all so fantastic and relatable. The mother is, technically, the villain (or, more accurately, the antagonist) of this story, though no matter how much she upset me by ignoring the wishes of her child, I still couldn’t help but feel the spirit of the woman who wants to protect her children as best as she can. She is asked, repeatedly in the movie, when is enough enough, where is the line for going too far, and she never seems to answer those questions, she remains defiant in her choices. You see a lot of a person who feels justified in what they’ve done, almost heartlessly so, to the point where they can’t admit that they’re wrong or have gone too far.
The husband could have used a little more time in the spotlight, but perhaps the most emotional moment with the father is when Kate looks at a scrapbook she’s made and apologizes for taking his first love away from him. Brian (Jason Patric) is the likeable foil to Sara, as the father who cares about all of his children equally and who listens to his daughters when they talk about their problems (while, conversely, Sara ignores anyone who doesn’t support her plans). The brother, Jesse, could have played a bigger part or have been left out of the movie entirely—there are scenes of him alone in the city, lurking, but they don’t do a very good job of depicting what his life is like (in the book, it seems that he had developed a drug habit because he wasn’t getting any attention at home, but this was very poorly portrayed in the movie, hence my belief that he could have arguably been left out if they hadn’t wanted to include that part of the story), but ultimately he does seem to be a tired, caring brother.
Anna and Kate are great as well. You have two very close sisters, one who completely understands her place and the other who feels guilty about putting her family through so much for something that was nobody’s fault. When Anna is asked if she understands what will happen if she refuses to donate her kidney to her sister, she does seem to be in complete understanding, despite her mother’s insistence that she doesn’t fully comprehend the consequences. At first, one might argue that Anna almost behaves as if she’s reciting things that someone else has told her, but ultimately, the movie actually makes sense of that as well by the end. As for Kate… she really is that sweet kid who is just going through way too much for a child of that age. She seems tired, unhappy, frustrated, and guilty… all things that make perfect sense for someone who’s been doing chemo and radiation, who has good and bad days to a severe degree, and who really and truly does understand the nature of life and death.
The ethical question of the story is, whether it’s okay to harvest one of your children for the sake of another, and where is the line drawn. There’s nothing in the world better than a sympathetic antagonist, which makes Sara so interesting, as she is 100% on her daughter’s team… it’s just that she’s only considering Kate and not Anna. I felt her in me, when my cub was still alive… the mother who would do anything, be anything, to protect her damaged child. The lengths we can go to, the monsters we become, all with the best intentions for keeping our loved ones safe and with us. When my cub died, I had to reshape my entire worldview on death because I couldn’t exist in a world where my son just ceased to exist. That worldview seems to be in-keeping with the movie, where the kids talk vaguely about reincarnation a few times. Kate talks about how she hopes to see Taylor again (her boyfriend, who passed away a few days after their prom), while Anna asks if Kate will wait for her in the great beyond. I still feel my little bear cub with me somedays, so I do believe that people stick around us when we want them to. This movie was really very validating for how I handled my own grief.
I also know that sometimes, life is just too hard to go on. Though my cub didn’t suffer from cancer like Kate, he suffered from the traumas relating to physical and emotional abuse from his birth family. His health was horrifying and any degree of stress (which he was extremely prone to) could result in him getting very ill. He was never able to try suicide himself though he had had a few drug-related scares, but he often spoke about wanting to die. I tried to give him the best life I could, but even that isn’t enough sometimes. Death comes for us all, and sometimes us mamas have to let go for everyone’s sake. This is why I believe that the movie is ultimately not about Anna or even Kate, but about Sara reaching the point where she simply just has to let go and admit that her daughter is going to die. The scene where she realizes this is so powerful and perhaps one of the best moments of acting I’ve seen from Diaz (whom I have been known to consider a bit of an over-actor). I recognized that collapse, that moment of understanding coming in, and the outburst that results from it… anyone who called this movie a “melodramatic tear-jerker” clearly hasn’t been through grief, not like its portrayed in this movie. I didn’t find anything at all melodramatic about what happens in this film. Grelief is a real thing.
So, this was ultimately probably one of the best movies I saw in 2023. I heavily recommend it if you know anyone with cancer (especially young people with cancer), or if you have had troubles with letting someone go. Down below are some further insights that are a little more spoilery, but hopefully that’s not too big of a deal, since the movie is pretty old at this point.
Differences from the Book
One of the things that really surprised me about this film, however, related to when I looked into the book it was based off, by Jodi Picoult. I actually think that the original story was considerably worse than the movie (a rarity), because of where the climactic focus was. Spoilers for the book, but the book ends with Anna getting in a car crash and them essentially harvesting all of her organs before she dies from the brain damage. Kate goes on to talk about how her sister is a part of her and she has a life because of her sister… frankly, that ending sounds unrealistic, though perhaps because I’m not a fan of sugar-coating things at this point in my life. Cancer is awful, it’s hard, and no matter how long you last, we all die eventually. The book feels more like a bad fairytale, where Kate gets to live because of Anna, whereas the movie shows a much more realistic depiction of things: kids with cancer have it hard and don’t always survive. The more easily we can accept death as a natural part of life, the more easily we can get over it. The book feels like it offers false hope, whereas the movie is beautiful for how it comes to accept death as a natural part of things. In this sense, I think the story in the movie was far superior than what the book had to offer, which did seem more like a melodramatic tear-jerker.
Spoiler Zone
About halfway through the movie, I clocked what was going on. As I mentioned in brief, Anna recites her rights in a very mature way for an 11-year-old, very firm, and refuses to discuss her reasoning. After an hour, I realized that the reason she’s refusing to discuss it is because it probably wasn’t her idea in the first place. Sure enough, as the trial proceeds, we find out that it was actually Kate who put her up to this. Kate had asked her to refuse to donate her kidney. She realized that it would cripple her sister’s future and that she would be tying her family down into caring for her for so much longer. She really feels like an exhausted 15-year-old who has been suffering on and off already for over a decade and doesn’t want to see her sister keep going through more painful procedures, doesn’t want to see her mother stressing all the time, doesn’t want to see her brother and father in the back seats… she’s done, she knows her time has come, and she’s ready to let go.
What’s so gut-wrenching is that her mother isn’t there with her. You see these scenes where everyone else understands and they just want to make as many nice memories with Kate as they possibly can, while she’s still with them, all while Sara loses her mind and demands to have Kate sent back to the hospital, rather than having one more day at the beach. It’s heartbreaking to watch, because you understand where Sara is coming from, even though she’s being a bit of a monster to her whole family. And when we reach the end, where Kate tells her that her time has come… I’ve not been there, per se, but I’ve been in a similar place and I was fully with this fictional mother as she comes to term with the realization that her daughter is done and doesn’t want to go on anymore. It’s the moment when you’re forced to let go and turn a person into a beloved memory. It’s heartbreaking and it’s a part of life.
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