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FILM REVIEW: My Sister's Keeper, Chichester Cineworld (12A) (109 mins).
It's just as well we sit and watch films in the dark. You?ll be visibly wrecked by this one, a gut-wrenching realisation of every parent?s worst nightmare.
You'll be sniffling within minutes, and the floodgates will open soon after.
The heart-strings aren't just tugged in My Sister's Keeper; they're repeatedly swung on until they pretty much snap.
The film is the bizarre tale, based on Jodi Picoult's book, of 13-year-old Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Breslin) who sues her parents in a bid for medical emancipation.
As she says, she was made in a dish in order to provide spare body parts for her terminally-ill sister Kate (Sofie Vassilieva).
But Anna has had enough. After years of being used for cells and the like, she reaches the end of her tether when it's expected that she will donate a kidney in an almost-certainly vain attempt to save her sister's life.
And so she turns to attorney Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin) who initiates court proceedings which bring her face to face with her own mother, a lapsed lawyer who returns to the law to force Anna to cave in once again.
Playing the mother is Cameron Diaz, an absolute revelation in this film. More often Diaz is the dim, ditzy blond. Here she proves that she really can act - and how - turning in a terrific performance as a tiger mother desperately clinging to her one last thread of hope.
Even more remarkable, indeed astonishing, are the assured, utterly-convincing and painfully-moving performances from the two girls.
Breslin we already know about, a superb young actress who manages to convey emotion without ever being sickly sweet; Vassilieva is even better, powerfully imagining herself into the unimaginable.
You?ll walk out blinking into the sunlight, feeling like you've been thrown into an emotional liquidiser - which is more or less when the doubts start kicking in.
It's compelling stuff all the while you sit there, but afterwards it's difficult to avoid the feeling that the film's sole purpose was to make us blub.
It's difficult to think that we've actually learnt anything about terminal illness - which leaves the question hanging as to whether it's been paraded before us simply as mawkish entertainment.
And then you start to wonder even more... How worthy is it, however brilliantly you do it, to turn a healthy-looking child into one so visibly at death's door? Great make-up. Dubious motives. And what on earth does it do to the child?
Poor old Marley went to make his maker earlier this year in another big-screen tear-jerker. But Marley was a dog. When you're dealing with a child, the whole thing starts seeming rather more manipulative.
The family face a moral dilemma. And so too, in a different way, do we as viewers - once we've stopped sobbing.
Phil Hewitt
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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