The Walking (Almost) Dead: MAGGIE

Disease has long been one of the many metaphors at the zombie movie’s disposal. They come freighted with plague imagery, and with concepts of sickness, infection, and contagion as core elements of plot progression. There’s often a scene in a zombie movie in which a healthy character is bitten, giving the other characters and the audience some queasy suspense as we wonder whether someone will kill their infected friend before full zombification takes effect. That’s the core sick pit of dread in Maggie, a new zombie feature that’s the directorial debut of graphic designer Henry Hobson. Working from a screenplay by John Scott 3, Hobson makes a disease-of-the-week picture out of horror materials, treating a zombie plague as a Black Death sweeping the country. The healthy hole up in their houses, praying the curse doesn’t visit their doors, forcing them to watch their loved ones turn zombie before their eyes.

The focus is on a farmer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his wife (Joely Richardson) whose teenaged daughter (Abigail Breslin) is in the hospital. She’s been diagnosed as infected with the zombie bug and given two weeks before her skin starts to decay and her cannibalistic appetite kicks in. What follows is not what one would expect from hearing Schwarzenegger is starring in a film about zombies. There’s no muscle-bound fight for a cure here. Instead, the girl is released home, where her family must watch her slowly succumb to her fate, and take her to be put down once she’s a monster. They know there will soon come a day when their daughter would mindlessly eat them. But until that day, they will enjoy the time they have left with her.

There’s an inevitability to this film’s progression, a slow, somber affair. It’s a gloomy movie, glum with distended dread as it stretches one familiar zombie moment to just under 90 minutes. The film is shot in dreary light, Lukas Ettlin’s cinematography always catching the sun in the process of rising or falling, with little direct illumination, especially in dusty farmhouse interiors. A deathly pall hangs over the proceedings, the atmosphere heavy with unspoken sadness, as if the family were starting to mourn even while trying to cling to their daughter’s presence. It’s a deathbed vigil with the added suspense of knowing the disease won’t just take their loved one. It’ll make her dangerous for everyone around.

Throughout are other zombie encounters haunting and startling, like one involving a little girl with hollow eyes and a filthy white dress slowly emerging from the forest, deeply unsettling and unspeakably sad. But the center of attention remains the family unit. Schwarzenegger, pushing 70, has aged into less of an action hero, but more of an actor. Always a formidable screen presence, he’s now able to rest his weathered face in a frown of pathos, here playing a character beaten down by an apocalyptic scenario that’s left crops burning and cars crumpled, and now threatens to take his daughter, too. Breslin plays her with a flat teenage affect made fragile by a death sentence, trying desperately to stay human, but also not getting her hopes up. Receiving a zombie diagnosis can’t be easy, but it’s a lot harder in Maggie’s world, where the transformation is in agonizing slow motion.

I wish this movie had more complications. It’s all so drearily straightforward, a clear line from point A to point B without any interesting detours along the way. Its commitment to one stifling mood, presented without variation in increasingly agonizingly long minutes, is a bit overdone. But Hobson’s command of tone and confidence in allowing his actors to carry potentially laughable material with total sincerity is admirable. He takes one of the key thrills of both zombie movies and Schwarzenegger actioners – the kills – and turns it into the most dreadfully sorrowful outcome.

Family Matters: AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

In adapting his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play August: Osage County to screenplay form, Tracy Letts, who has also adapted his Bug and Killer Joe into movies, trimmed the runtime by an hour but kept a great deal of its rich selection of meaty dialogues and monologues. The resulting film gathers a hugely talented ensemble and sets them before this all-you-can-act buffet and lets them chew. It’s theatrical, obviously finely written and overacted to the rafters. The story kicks off with the disappearance of the old patriarch of a large Oklahoman family. We glimpse him, played by Sam Shephard, in a brief introductory scene during which he reads us some T.S. Eliot in voice over. But now he’s gone, and his pill-popping cancer-patient wife (Meryl Streep) calls her grown daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, and Juliette Lewis) home to wait and worry. Showing off its stagebound roots by trapping the ensemble in a stuffy house – you can almost feel the dusty stillness of the oppressive late-summer air – the film is eager to show us these great actors delivering great dialogue.

The screen is crowded with characters and none escape emotionally unscathed. Streep’s matriarch has cancer of the mouth and early on shouts that the pain has her feeling like he tongue is on fire. Hoo boy, is it ever. She spits unfiltered invective at everyone and everything, screwing up her face as if sucking on a lemon before the acid bubbles out of her, eating away at her family members. She feels neglected. She feels unappreciated. She feels abandoned. She’s shockingly mean and caustic under the mistaken belief that she’s simply telling the truth. You can feel sorry for her while completely understanding why two of her three daughters would want to move so far away. Roberts, who flies in with her husband (Ewan McGregor) and daughter (Abigail Breslin), is anxious and depressed. Lewis, the flightiest daughter, arrives with a stranger (Dermot Mulroney) she introduces, to her family’s surprise, as her fiancé. Nicholson, the most reserved and quietly dutiful of the daughters, has been helping her mother’s caretaker (Misty Upham), to what many characters assume is the detriment of her personal life. Streep’s sister (Margo Martindale), brother-in-law (Chris Cooper), and nephew (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrive as well, casserole in tow.

The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy disastrous dinner scene in which everyone gets to masticate over their lines with great delight as they start slow and build to a great roaring cacophony of spitting, wailing, teasing, lamenting, hollering, accusing, reminiscing, and snapping. In this scene, and many that approach its intensity of character and feeling, the acting is energetic, enthusiastic, and convincing in a beautifully theatrical way. It wouldn’t work if the ensemble was not so nicely balanced, some (Streep, Roberts, Martindale, Lewis) going so big, teeth tearing at every bit of scenery that crosses their paths, that others (Cooper, Nicholson, Breslin) can lean back and go low-key and small. There’s a sense of generosity, the actors pitching their performances at just the right levels to blend wonderfully without a sense that anyone is trying to out act their castmates. It’s gloriously hammy in the best sense of theatricality and the film is wise to step back and let them roar.

That’s precisely what the film is best at giving us: a talented ensemble chewing its way through delicious writing. It’s not much in the way of visually interesting, but that’s hardly an attempt on my part to pin the movie’s faults on staginess. On the contrary, I found the film’s theatrical roots to be better the more clearly and simply shown. This is only the second film from director John Wells, a longtime TV writer, director, and showrunner most famous for NBC’s E.R. and currently of Showtime’s Shameless. He shoots the film only functionally, with little personality. He stays out of the way of the crackling chaos in the familial war of words as old resentments erupt, spilling over into freshly growing fissure vents.

Even after slightly over two hours, there’s not much clarity in the geography of our surroundings or the house’s architecture. And the few attempts to open up past the proscenium – just a couple of car trips, really – seem too desperate an attempt to make it play at some imagined ideal of cinematic interpretation. Wells’s inexpressive direction dutifully captures the performances and allows for appreciation of Letts’s writing, but more imagination in the visual staging, and maybe even a better sense of claustrophobia by heightening the theatrical roots, would’ve brought the whole endeavor up to the same level as the material and the performances. He traffic-cops the cast capably, coaxing a fine-tuned sense of energy and a great underlying tension in the straining relationships. But in the end, I found myself appreciating the performances and the writing more than being moved by the whole.

Bored Game: ENDER'S GAME

Ender’s Game recalls sci-fi movies of days gone by in which the future entails wearing matching jumpsuits, walking through glowing grey corridors, staring intently at touchscreens, and gravely contemplating strategy. Based on the novel of the same name by virulent homophobe (that’s putting it mildly and has little to no bearing on the content of the story, but needs to be said nonetheless) Orson Scott Card, the story takes place far in the future, some fifty years after aliens attacked our planet and were beaten back by man’s superior military might. Now young people are picked to enter Battle School, recruited and trained to eventually become military leaders who will take the battle back to the alien’s home world, where a preemptive strike will hopefully wipe out any chance of further conflict. There’s a tricky moral dilemma at the center of the narrative, but it’s underplayed here in a film that’s quickly obviously a self-serious Starship Troopers for dummies.

Our hero is one Ender Wiggins (Hugo’s Asa Butterfield), a boy we’re told early and often is the best there is. Scowling adults in military garb (Harrison Ford, Viola Davis, Nonso Anozie) are constantly talking with each other, marveling at how remarkable a student Ender is, how promising his abilities are, and how much of their hope for mankind rests on his shoulders. Ender bids a tearful goodbye to his beloved sister (Abigail Breslin) and is shipped off to Battle School, an orbiting space station with a nifty zero-gravity bubble in the middle, where the bulk of the film is given over to watching his classmates and him train, take classes, exercise, and learn to behave like the child army they’re to become. He meets kids who like him (Hailee Steinfeld, Aramis Knight) and kids who don’t like him (Moises Arias, Conor Carroll). But, as we know, Ender’s far and away the best student. Why? I don’t know, but all the characters keep saying it.

Maybe it’s not so obvious on the page, but on screen it’s clear that Ender is a terrible protagonist. I don’t mean that as a value judgment. It’s merely an assessment of my level of interest. He’s a scrawny, stoic kid blandly marched up the level of command, told every step of the promotional ladder that he’s something like a genius. He knows it, too. He’s just so vacant that when he takes strong stances – mouthing off to Ford or threatening to quit the program – it’s hard to tell where his character stops and his plot function begins. It’s a movie that values telling us about characters over letting the characters be. You could assemble a remarkable cast, and indeed the filmmakers have, but they can’t do much with material that involves characters telling each other about each other. By the time Ben Kingsley shows up covered in Maori tattoos and speaking in an Australian accent, it’s no surprise that he’s nothing more than yet another plot point.

The adaptation is written and directed by South African director Gavin Hood who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar for his modest Tsotsi in 2005 before going on to take the blame for the mess that became X-Men Origins: Wolverine. (The less said about that the better.) He’s bad at drawing connections between these characters. It’s not easy to see why we should care about relationships and supporting characters beyond the fact that they’re our main characters, played by likable actors and cute kids, and have hung around the plot for long enough to generate some familiarity. The visuals around them, though, are nice enough. Hood keeps things sleek and steady, making it an atypical production that would rather you see the action than feel the chaos. It’s a good choice. Even as my mind drifted during long scenes of exposition and flatly stated themes, it’s a film that always looks good, like something I would’ve totally loved when I was a 12-year-old.

The film was co-financed by visual effects company Digital Domain, the people responsible for such wonderments of effects work as Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean, Apollo 13, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Tron Legacy, just to name a few. When Ender’s Game breaks away from the largely confined corridors of the Battle School, a place I took to thinking as Boring Space Hogwarts, the spaceships are generic sci-fi designs done up nicely. The climax, which involves hundreds of ships spiraling and swarming in deep space, is exciting and involving, which makes the dramas of kids and commanders in the dénouement resonate with a bit of a kick. Suddenly there’s meaning, and a real filmic charge, out of something we’ve seen acted out instead of having simply been told. That the story has indistinct politics and a fuzzy point of view allows the story to have its whiz-bang lightshow climax and make us feel bad about it too. Would that the whole film were as exciting as its final moments. 

Hold the Phone: THE CALL

I could never be a 911 operator. I don’t have the emotional stamina for the job. On the other end of the switchboard is an unpredictable deluge of human misery, waves of terrified and traumatized callers reporting their lives’ greatest horrors, sometimes inconsequential, sometimes matters of life and death. I have nothing but admiration for those who work calmly and professionally through these calls, sending help to the right locations, expediting responses to emergencies. The modest thriller The Call gets a lot of mileage out of this work environment. Its protagonist, a tough, professional operator played by Halle Berry, answers a call from a teenage girl (Abigail Breslin) who has been attacked and now finds herself trapped in a trunk. Berry can’t get a lock on the location and so together with the girl they work out a way to find clues to the location of the car and the identity of her kidnapper.

The bulk of the film is devoted to this titular call. It’s like the inverse of the unfortunately forgotten 2004 David R. Ellis thriller Cellular, the first movie to really milk the then-newer technology of the cell phone to get nonstop genre chills and spills out of it. That movie had Chris Evans getting a call from a hostage who managed to hotwire a broken telephone to dial a random number. Much fun is made out of moments like a mad scramble for a phone charger, what with having to keep the connection while Evans dashes about trying to get clues and get help for the mystery caller. This time around, the hostage is on the move. In trembling close-ups, we cut between Berry and Breslin, talking through the nerve-wracking scenario. The operator, with little information, tries to gather up what she can and send help to the appropriate spot. One fun trick involves kicking out a taillight and sticking a hand through the hole, hoping that another driver will notice and call in to 911. The sight of a pale arm awkwardly waving through a hole in a dark red trunk is vivid genre imagery.

In terse crosscutting, we follow Berry’s cop boyfriend (Morris Chestnut) as he provides the plot with the necessary role of a protagonist on the move. With information fed to him by Berry, he leads the charge in sending police to and fro, picking up on the trail of breadcrumbs left by the various clues. Director Brad Anderson shoots things with a no-nonsense simplicity that keeps the plot moving along tensely and efficiently. I usually find him to be a director whose films kick up fine mood, but tend to seem awfully undercooked on the level of character and narrative. In films like Session 9 and Vanishing on 7th Street, I find myself wishing that he could push his neo-Twilight Zone narrative tendencies further into abstraction, leaving the pesky clumsiness of his storytelling behind.  In The Call, as in his best film, the icy train-set twister Transsiberian, he has a nice, simple premise to work with, matching mood with action in a way that’s largely satisfying for much of the runtime.

It's too bad that the script by Richard D’Ovidio (his first produced screenplay since the remake of Thirteen Ghosts over a decade ago) has a howler of a climax, a sustained sequence of one character acting outside the law, setting off on a secretive investigation that’s filled with all kinds of reasons to exclaim “Don’t go in there!” “Watch out behind you!” and “What do you think you’re doing?” It’s a particularly icky form of exploitation revenge and a sour note on which to end an otherwise trim and crisp thriller.  It doesn’t help that the more we learn about the kidnapper, the more he seems to be nothing more than a generic creep of the kind you could see on any TV procedural any night of the week. Come to think of it, though The Call is ultimately only a slightly-better-than-mediocre B-movie, it’d have made a fine pilot. (Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Anderson has done his best work on TV, especially in his handling of 12 episodes of the paranormal investigation procedural Fringe.) Wouldn’t you want to watch a detective series about Halle Berry taking 911 calls and sending Morris Chestnut to investigate? I know I would. There’s even an ideologically interesting hero shot of Berry towards the end of the film, a low angle image that captures an American flag billowing in the background. The filmmakers have ahold of something intriguing with this premise and they come close to pulling it off.

Crowded Party: NEW YEAR'S EVE

New Year’s Eve is a cinematic Wal-Mart, crowded, cavernous, filled with cheap versions of exactly the products you’d expect, and no one seems particularly happy to be there. Like Valentine’s Day, also inflicted, albeit with less pain, by director Garry Marshall, the new film is a massive ensemble romantic comedy built around a holiday, a slickly produced product, nothing more than an excuse to see dozens of celebrities, or at least recognizable faces, playing just about everyone on screen but the extras. It used to be that when this many name actors showed up in one place the boat was capsizing or the skyscraper’s ribbon-cutting party was going up in flames. Now, all that happens is precisely what you’d expect in the form of predictable, plodding sitcom pandering and plots thin to the point of breaking. The only disaster is how exhaustingly cliché and dispiritingly unimaginative it is.

There are 31 recognizable faces (at least when I counted them just now on the cast list from IMDb) in New Year’s Eve, which zips around New York on December 31, 2011 as people fall in love (never out, this is one aggressively happy movie) and find their soul mates. It seems pointless to try and point out individual characters and motivations as the film is so cluttered and static that by the time we’ve met everyone and learned their main conflict, there’s barely time to resolve them before the ball drops and Times Square explodes in confetti. Besides, the characters barely registered in my head as anything but the person playing them. It’s like a bad school play in which you can only think about little Bobby when you’re meant to see the man supposedly on his deathbed.

Of course in this case little Bobby’s last name is DeNiro. His nurse is Halle Berry and his doctor is Cary Elwes. Then there’s Hilary Swank directing the Times Square festivities, fretting about the ball drop with security guard Ludacris. When, much to the dismay of Ryan Seacrest (as himself), there’s a technical glitch, Hector Elizondo shows up to fix it. There’s also Sarah Jessica Parker who says daughter Abigail Breslin can’t go downtown with Jake T. Austin. Stuck in an elevator in their apartment building are Ashton Kutcher and Lea Michele. Jessica Biel and Seth Meyers are about to have a baby and are competing with Sarah Paulson and Til Schweiger to have the first baby of the New Year. OB/GYN Carla Gugino is not amused. Mousy secretary Michelle Pfeiffer convinces bike messenger Zac Efron to help her finish her list of resolutions before midnight. Executive Josh Duhamel catches a ride into the city with Yeardley Smith and family. And Katherine Heigl and Sofia Vergara are catering Cherry Jones’s fancy party at which Jon Bon Jovi (not playing himself) will perform.

As you can see, it’s a little ridiculous. It got to the point that, when Ludacris tells Hilary Swank that “Mr. so-and-so is here,” I was only pondering which famous face would step out of the back of that limo. (Matthew Broderick). Rather than bringing all we know about the personas to their roles to serve as some kind of insta-character, the overloaded cast only points out the thinness of it all. Not a one of these plotlines could stand by itself. Worse, the way Katherine Fugate’s script stumbles from one scene to the next refuses to allow the characters to thematically interact. This is a movie that has nothing to say and little idea of how to even make that fact entertaining. We’re supposed to be delighted when, say Efron answers the phone “hey, sis,” and we learn which big name has been – gasp! – his sister this whole time! If the film were packed with too many Meet Cutes and sweeping smooches, it would still reach a point of diminishing returns well before the film’s credit cookies but at least it wouldn’t be quite so empty. For all of these actors present, so many dumb threads of plot, there’s just not enough to sustain two hours. Why couldn’t someone find something interesting for someone, anyone, in the cast to do? New Year’s Eve is a celebration of the superficial without the energy or the trashy pleasure such celebrations could provide.

The Good, The Bad, and the Lizard: RANGO

Rango is a computer-animated family film about a lizard with no name. He bounces out of the back of a truck and crash lands his terrarium on the side of a desert highway. Looking for signs of civilization he ends up in the pint-sized wild-west town of Dirt that’s populated by poor animals who are suffering from a terrible drought. They could also use a hero. So, this lizard says his name’s Rango, a rough, tough, capable gunslinger. Naturally, the townspeople make him sheriff. It’s not like they have a better option.

It’s a film that follows easily recognizable Western tropes, but it’s even more endearingly odd than you’d expect. This is a cockeyed postmodern western that’s a total delight in its energetic entertainment. It’s also a fantastically dark and fairly complicated look at the make up of identity. Rango himself puts on a new identity when stumbling into an animal Wild West town, playing his hero role as John Wayne by way of Don Knotts. He’s a thespian who builds his reality out of fiction, much like the film itself builds a glorious feat of originality out of gorgeous homage.

Directed by Gore Verbinski, he of The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean fame, creates a world of starkly unexpected originality. From a script by John Logan, it’s one part kids’ film, one part Chinatown, and one part sophisticated revisionist Western. I never would have thought that was a combination that could be pulled off, let alone this well. Is Rango crowd-pleasing? I’d like to think so. This is a film that’s certainly, for lack of a better term, weird. But it’s also a rather safe kind of weird. It’s not at all alienating in its unexpected strangeness. There’s great energy in its visual wit, in the inventive and spectacularly staged set-pieces that riff on classic Westerns in enjoyable ways while still remaining faithful to the colorful, accessible milieu of its own that is created. This is hardly a film so burdened down with homage that it becomes inaccessible to all but the amateur film scholars in the audience. This is closer in spirit to Tarantino; the references are there if you catch them, but they’re still just a part of a larger entertaining picture.

There’s also great energy and skill to be found in the hugely entertaining chameleon-like voice performances. It’s a rare animated film that has its big-name voice cast disappear into the texture. Other than the marquee name of Johnny Depp (the film is, after all, being sold as “Johnny Depp is…Rango”), who remains recognizable through his excellent voice work, the cast so thoroughly inhabits their parts that the end credits were a delightful surprise to find out just who had a personality provided by the likes of Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Abigail Breslin, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, and Bill Nighy. These aren’t camouflaged star turns. These are specific characters, detailed and quirky in their own specific ways.

The characters are also remarkably ugly, vividly so. The animation, supplied by the special-effects studio Industrial Light and Magic in their first foray into feature length cartooning, is extraordinarily detailed. These are no rounded, soft, appealing prototypes for toys. These are realistically scarred and feathered creatures with ugly lumps and awkward gestures. They’re anthropomorphized, sure. But they’re much more grotesquely animal than we’re used to seeing in films of this type.

Which leads me back to Rango himself. His character is deeply, appealingly peculiar in his fluid identity and in his naked yearning for acceptance at any cost. It turns this enjoyable genre mashup into something a bit deeper, into a story about the power of constructed identity. It’s about, if I may be just a tad highfalutin here, the tension between who we are and what we say we are, a theme that crystallizes in a scene of chilly beauty as a distraught character contemplates committing suicide through a nighttime crossing of a dangerous road while long white-and-red streaks of taillights go soaring by. That’s rather deep stuff for what seems, at least on the surface, to be and is both a raucous Western and a rip-roarin’ animated family film. Indeed, I found the experience to be rather soulful amidst its jagged edges, western tropes, sand-scored scenery, and ugly folks. Much like last March’s How to Train Your Dragon, this is a film that builds its colorful entertainment from emotions instead of solely from flippant commercialism, proving that Pixar isn’t the only American animation company capable of high standards.

Scaring Up Silver Screen Shrieks: A Halloween 2009 Guide

For those who don’t want to be stuck at home to hand out candy today (or have already partied), the multiplex is a surprisingly good place to rustle up some scares this year. Sure, there’s still a Saw and a remake (The Stepfather), both unseen by me, but there are some good choices out there.

First, there’s the low-budget, big box-office, sleeper hit of the fall Paranormal Activity. It’s not a great horror movie but its low-tech effects are all the more scary for being uncomplicated and eerily convincing. It’s a slow-building freak out that grows steadily more frightening as the stakes are raised and the set pieces get scarier. Every night, the lead couple goes to bed. Every night, something weird happens. Through “found footage” the story unspools, with occasional expository clumsiness and a very stupid Ouija Board time-waster, but mostly with unsettling tension. With hype of the “scariest movie ever” variety, I went into the screening ready to prove the hype wrong. For quite a while I had my arms crossed over my chest while thinking “creepy, but not too scary.” By the last third of the movie I was worried I would chew off my bottom lip. It's still not the scariest movie ever, and it's too unsatisfying to be a great movie, but it's good as a horror experience. The movie plays all too well on an elemental fear of the dark and the all-too frightening question: “what happens while you are asleep?” Sure, buckets of blood are startling, but it has nothing on a scream piercing the darkness, jolting a character out of his sleep. Let me tell you, that scream haunted my ears for days.

On a less intense, but even more entertaining, note there’s Zombieland, a zom-com in the vein of the subgenre classic Shaun of the Dead. This film is a bit less great than that one, but it’s still a raucous haunted-hay-ride of a movie. Four survivors of a zombie apocalypse team up to go cross country. A typically odd mish-mash of character types, the group consists of a macho-man survivalist (Woody Harrelson), a nerdy agoraphobic (Jesse Eisenberg), and a young woman (Emma Stone) and her younger sister (Abigail Breslin). Together, they get in to all kinds of wacky adventures and close-calls, not unlike a normal zombie movie but played with a lighter, nimbler, tone. What prevents the movie from being standard and routine are the marvelous comedic performances from all involved, helped tremendously by an uncomplicated and funny script that sails along at a breakneck speed with plenty of wit and good-nature. First-time director Ruben Fleischer directs with a light touch and an enjoyably creative visual style. Zombieland may not be all that scary, but it’s a blast.

As for Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, it gets a much more qualified recommendation from me. It’s based on the first three volumes of a book series, and it consequentially feels rushed and cluttered, with almost too many underdeveloped characters for its own good. It’s also a movie that has way more wind-up than pitch, with one eye always on a sequel. However, director Paul Weitz (is he jealous his brother Chris has the Twilight sequel next month?) directs with just enough likable style and his cast, especially John C. Reilly as the titular vampire, young newcomer Chris Massoglia as the titular assistant, and Josh Hutcherson as the budding baddie, is just endearing enough that the movie squeaks by. It’s no great thing, but it was an enjoyable distraction on the lazy Saturday afternoon when I caught the matinee.

My Sister's Keeper (2009)

From the time she took her first breath, eleven-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) has been donating blood, tissues, and organs to her sister’s leukemia fight. Now, with a dangerous transplant operation looming, Anna decides she’s had enough. She hires a hot-shot lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sue her parents for medical emancipation. This sets the stage for My Sister’s Keeper, an adaptation of the Jodi Picoult novel, it shares its source’s main strengths and its main problem. Both book and film have a great grabber of a concept that plays on the heartstrings but neither have any way of satisfyingly resolving its central moral dilemma.

With whom do you side? Is it the young girl who is frustrated at being created for the sole purpose of keeping her sister alive? Is it the exhausted-yet-determined mom (Cameron Diaz) who won’t stop fighting until her sick child is well? This is truly a matter of life and death. It’s not easy to take a side. There are no easy answers, and the movie isn’t interested in answering them, all for the better. The movie gets by on its emotionally resonating performances (Diaz is a standout). As a result, for most of its runtime, the movie is a super-slick Hollywood tear-jerker, a three-hankie salute to disease that is shot through with nearly suffocating sentimentality. This movie is on a mission to make you cry. The only discordant notes are struck with dreary and sappy soundtrack choices, bad songs to go with terrible montages.

The courtroom drama aspect of the plot is shoved to the background, the filmmakers choosing to instead focus on the grueling medical procedures and slow-motion decay of its central girl. Young actress Sofia Vassilieva is dolled up in the trappings of a cancer-patient with admirable attention to detail from the make-up department. It’s unflinchingly frank at times. The movie barely starts and we’ve seen our first nosebleed. Vomiting blood, eerie veins under pale translucent skin, and creeping bruises also make appearances. I really should have thought twice before buying the popcorn I ended up barely touching. All the attention to medical detail creates a visceral sense of what the family (we bounce between points of view, which unfortunately means narration replaces subtext) is arguing about, grounding the melodrama in ways a network TV-movie couldn’t. This is not a film that is shy about its topic.

And yet, the movie can’t bring its varying threads to a satisfying close. Instead, it goes into emotional overdrive – albeit in a different way than in the novel – yanking on the heartstrings and massaging the tear ducts with such single-minded intensity that it would seem the filmmakers would like your sobbing to cover up the lack of conclusion. (The book and movie differ only in content, not quality). Though there is certainly an endpoint to the plot – something definitively final occurs – there is no emotional resolution. Diaz, especially, is asked to sell some rushed characterization that I just didn’t buy.

Director Nick Cassavetes, who previously directed the equally teary The Notebook, knows the time and location of the buttons to press, though. As a disease-of-the-week weeper, My Sister’s Keeper is a mostly acceptable entry. It goes through the motions, and puts it audience through the emotional wringer, even if it doesn’t quite add up in the end.