My Sister's Keeper

It’s a perfect entertainment trifecta: A hospital drama, a courtroom drama and a dying child.What more could anyone ask for summer movie-going? Certanly not "My Sister’s Keeper," which opens here today. Someone should have taken this overwrought, dishonest tear-jerker and drowned it in the nearest bathtub.

Of course, it’s based on a Jodi Picoult novel, and she specializes in novels about helpless children in imminent danger. Jeremy Leven and Nick Cassavetes wrote the screenplay, and Cassavetes directed in four-handkerchief style. His only moment of imagination came with Alec Baldwin’s service dog, whom he named Judge, opening lots of lines for a publicity-seeking, TV-using attorney to use in or out of court. (Imagine him calling, "Here, Judge, you miserable S.O.B.")

If you can imagine two more disgraceful and abusive parents than Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric) Fitzgerald, I’d like to hear about them. But when these people discover that their daughter, Katie (Sofia Vassilieva), has cancer and will die, they coldly and calculatingly create another daughter, in a Petri dish, with all the genes to become a child whose purpose in life is to serve as a garage of replacement parts for surgical donation to her sister. Abigail Breslin is this one, Anna, and she’s excellent, as is Evan Ellingson as Jesse, another child of the family. Vassilieva is your movie-typical dying child, bleeding, vomiting and suffering while emoting the usual platitudes, (Remember Charles Dickens’s "It is a far, far better place. . . " etc.)

Where was the doctor who oversaw this conception and birth? And where was the medical insurance company? I know this story is fiction, but Picoult has millions of readers, many of whom will be sure this is based on some USA Today-style factoid.

As much as I thought the movie was nonsense, I admired Diaz’ performance. Unable and unwilling to admit an error, she is a mother possessed, convinced that more and more medical treatment, more and more surgeries, will save Katie’s life. "You can’t heal without stainless steel," sometimes a surgeon’s mantra, obviously is her guiding light. And as a lawyer, she also is positive that she can win any argument, convince any of her children, her husband, a jury, that she is correct and her way is the right way. Diaz is terrific – and she made my stomach do flip-flops.

Baldwin is sturdily excellent, his kindness overcoming his image as the all-too familiar "Are you hurt? We’ll make ‘em pay" personal-injury lawyer seen in TV commercials. He has a medical problem, too, and just to make it unanimous in terms of people in pain, even Joan Cusack, as the judge brought in to hear the suit by Anna against her parents for medical emancipation, also is a victim of recent personal tragedy. No one involved in this film can let well-enough alone; we are inundated with illness, pain and tragedy from start to finish.

And speaking of finish, Cassavetes gives us about a half-dozen, ratcheting up the demand for tears with each. There were several low-key, poignant moments where he could easily have cut to the credits, but this is not his style. We get beach scenes, lake scenes, mountain scenes and others as Anna brings forth always more cliches about death and dying, in a rhythm that goes right along with the teary snuffles and nose-blowing honks of some of the audience.

At multiple locations

-Joe