Jodi Picoult is a bestselling author and with good reason. She has broken the mould of nice and neat literature by exploring taboo subjects with sensitivity and grit. She has explored horrific topics from rape to organ donation and terminal illness. Picoult’s specialty seems to be taking a closer look at the infamous grey area where things are not clear cut and there are different perspectives to consider.
In My Sister’s Keeper, she writes about a family with a child so sick they genetically alter a new baby to be born as a perfect match for its big sister. The cells from newborn Anna are used from the moment of her birth to help her big sister live just a little longer and continue as the years pass. And while all these operations and procedures help Kate live, they are not a cure and she continues to get sick and have treatment for her Leukaemia.
So when Anna goes to a lawyer and asks to sue for the rights to her own body, there are some serious reactions from her family. Her mother cannot understand how she could be so selfish and issue what is tantamount to a death sentence to her big sister while Anna’s father tries to understand and be more sympathetic to his daughter’s plight. After all, you can’t help one child by hurting another – can you?
Therein lies the moral and ethical dilemma that is explored so beautifully by Picoult throughout the book. As the court case continues, Kate is getting sicker and the already dysfunctional family unit starts to fracture even more under the increasing pressure. The marriage between mum Sarah and dad Brian is close to complete meltdown and tensions are constantly running high – as you might expect given all that the family has been through. The brother Jesse is all but forgotten amid the chaos. He isn’t sick and can’t help the child who is so he serves no purpose. Kate spends a lot of time in a hospital bed, sheltered by her parents and desperate to experience life while she is still around to live it. Her parents clearly think they are protecting her but frequently get it wrong or make it worse. Kate gets a brief flickering romance with a fellow patient at the hospital that is so cute and endearing it makes you smile.
The overall message of this powerful book is that no human is perfect and when faced with a situation as horrific as this, nobody knows how they would react. As with all good Picoult books, there are twists and turns you do not see coming that will leave you stunned and moved to tears on numerous occasions. It’s sensitive and oh so brave and one of the most compelling and heartbreaking books ever written.
The film is quite another matter entirely. With Abigail Breslin playing Anna and Cameron Diaz playing her mother, the film showed great promise. Throw in Alec Baldwin as the lawyer and you might just be on to a winner. Sadly, this was not to be.
I heard when this was due out that something big had been changed but when I saw it at the cinema I was horrified to discover what it was that had been altered. This pivotal change managed to turn a sensitive, sweet and endearing teen romance into something overly raunchy and unnecessary. It’s an overly sentimental destruction of a work of literary genius.
The really frustrating thing is that if it had stuck to the plot of the book, MY SISTER’S KEEPER could have been a classy, clever and endearing weepy but it ended up being an overly sentimental tearjerker, playing for cheap tears like a bad comedy plays for the cheap and obvious laughs. Despite the best efforts of its cast, the film is horrific, tacky and obvious.
I have never been so compelled to complain as I did when I watched this and even found myself going on to the Jodi Picoult website to ask her what the hell she had done in allowing them to destroy her masterpiece. Evidently I was not the first… as Jodi had already written on her page that she had no say in the matter and if you wanted to complain, do it the filmmakers directly…. so I did.
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