‘My Sister’s Keeper’ poses tough question

With this movie, viewers will discover a carefully calibrated and artfully underacted tale that evokes big feelings.

By ROBERT W. BUTLER

KANSAS CITY STAR

“Weeper” doesn’t begin to describe “My Sister’s Keeper.”

Yet that pejorative cheapens a film that overcomes an obscenely melodramatic setup to come by its tears honorably.

Nick Cassavetes’ latest is about a cancer-stricken child and the impact of her illness on her family. That alone will scare off fair-weather moviegoers.

Those made of sterner stuff will discover a carefully calibrated and artfully underacted tale that evokes big feelings — bigger feelings, in fact, than almost any other movie out there right now.

Based on Jodi Picoult’s best-seller (and smartly adapted by Cassavetes and Jeremy Leven to eliminate the novel’s excesses), “My Sister’s Keeper” focuses on the Fitzgerald family, which has been living too long in the shadow of death.

The adolescent Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) was diagnosed with leukemia as a little girl. For a decade she has been kept alive mostly with tissue transplants from her younger sister, Anna (“Little Miss Sunshine’s” Abigail Breslin), a child conceived and genetically engineered precisely for that purpose. Now the 10-year-old Anna is about to become a kidney donor for her sibling, and she’s had enough.

With the pro-bono help of a selfpromoting attorney (the ever-excellent Alec Baldwin) she’s suing her parents to achieve medical emancipation. She wants control over what’s done with her body.

The fallout is immediate. To mother Sara (Cameron Diaz), who has fought so fiercely for so long for Kate’s survival, this is a betrayal. A lawyer who gave up her career to tend her sick child, Sara now finds herself litigating against her other daughter.

Father Brian (Jason Patric), a firefighter long conflicted over Anna’s role as involuntary donor, is more understanding. But he lacks his wife’s fiery dedication. In playing a feeling but reticent man who provides his troubled brood with a solid emotional center, Patric gives what may be his most substantial performance. No method-y histrionics here, just inner strength.

Meanwhile middle child Jesse (Evan Ellingson) feels like a third wheel in this family drama, all but ignored as the others wrestle with life-and-death matters. Can’t blame the kid for being alienated, though one of the novel’s clunkiest ideas — that this son of a fireman would become an arsonist in a bid for attention — is blessedly absent from the film.

From this description one might surmise that “My Sister’s Keeper” is essentially a legal melodrama.

Not even close.

Using a fluid, time-jumping approach, Cassavetes and Leven attempt nothing less than a history of Kate’s brief life. Much of it is ugly — the film doesn’t hold back in depicting the horrors of advancing disease, and seeing them visited upon a child is almost unbearable.

Yet there’s plenty of hope here. The love of the Fitzgeralds for each other is palpable. And even a character like Sara, whose mother-as-health-Nazi approach sometimes seems more selfish than selfless, is given moments of grace, such as when she shaves her head out of solidarity for her chemo-ravaged daughter.

Holding the film together is Vassilieva’s performance as Kate. It’s the sort of workout role that lets an actor touch all the bases, from self-pity to stubborn self-assertion, fear to stoicism — even a brief fling with puppy love courtesy of a fellow cancer patient (Thomas Dekker, late of TV’s “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”). Vassilieva — a regular on TV’s “Medium” — is terrific.

So is Breslin, whose Anna offers an endearing blend of advanced intellect and childlike naivete.

Diaz is convincing as a woman so determined to keep her child alive that she’s stopped asking what the child wants.

I’ve never been a big fan of director Cassavetes (”John Q,” “The Notebook”), but you’ve got to be impressed by his deft handling of material that in the wrong hands could devolve into shameless bathos.

Granted, for many just the premise of “Sister’s Keeper” will seem horribly manipulative. They cannot be blamed for approaching with caution.

But given a chance, this film delivers.