my sister’s keeper: review (or rant, rather)

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***Spoiler alert: if you have not seen this movie, and don’t want to know anything about it until after you’ve seen it, stop reading now.***

okay, my friend christian writes these movie reviews, and i think they are pretty good, and a pretty good idea at that. so for one post (maybe more in the future… it depends on how this one turns out), i will copy his idea and tell you (or rant, rather) about the new movie, my sister’s keeper.

let me begin by saying that i read this book last summer, and completely loved it. it was sad, insightful, shocking, and beautiful all at the same time. so imagine how excited i was when i heard they were going to make the movie. i made david promise to take me as soon as it came out. so we went this past saturday. i walked into the movie completely excited. and then i walked out totally mad at hollywood. here’s why:

they completely changed the ending. not just a little detail here and there, but the ENTIRE ending. i am still trying to figure out how anyone in hollywood thought that the ending of this book wasn’t good enough? yes, there are sentimental movies that make you cry. this one did. and it still would have if the original ending would have played out, but it would have blindsided you at the same time.

so here’s what happened in a nut shell (for those who want to know): the story is about an 11 year old girl named anna who was a “designer baby”– specifically genetically designed to be a 100% match for her older sister, kate, who has a rare form of leukemia. so the minute anna was born, they took her cord blood. a few years later, bone marrow. you get the drift. so one day she walks into a lawyer’s office and tells him she wants to be “medically emancipated” from her parents and is suing them for the rights to her own body. once you think about it, it makes sense. (kate’s kidneys are failing, therefore they are already planning for anna to give her one of her kidneys).

so flashback after flashback, you see the story of this family. mostly true to the book. of course you can’t capture every detail, but movie goers get the picture. they even give you one of the twists at the ending, where we find out that kate made anna promise to get medically emancipated because kate was ready to go. therefore, the entire time the movie is setting you up for kate to die. and then that’s where everything capsized for me.

in the book, anna wins her court case. but before she is able to tell whether or not she would donate her kidney, she gets in a car wreck and is left without any brain function. since her lawyer had power of attorney over anna, he agrees to the operation. even though the doctors said that kate was too weak to survive the operation, they go ahead with it and kate lives. shocking, i know. but still, it blindsided me and left me with that uncomfortable but beautiful feeling you get after seeing movies like seven pounds or vanilla sky. you want it to end differently and everyone to live happily ever after, but at the same time you still love the uncomfortable ending.

in the movie, kate just died. she said all of her goodbyes (which i have to give props to cameron diaz in her goodbye scene… i held it together the entire movie until then), and then you hear anna narrating, saying that kate just stopped breathing that night and died. i wanted to jump up and scream “WHAT???” i’ve never been so disappointed in a movie’s ending, not being so true to the book. i mean, they totally killed another character and kept the one that was supposed to die alive. i really don’t get it.

…and as i step onto my soapbox: i thought that hollywood actually looked for the shock value in movies. the book ending would have done it, but i guess they just wanted to go with the memior type movie. it’s all fine and dandy if it were just a movie, but the way i look at it, this was someone’s piece of art that they just erased and drew a stick figure right smack dab in the middle of the canvas to totally change the piece. and here’s what the author, jodi picoult, has to say:

TO ALL MY FABULOUS FANS WHO’VE SEEN THE MOVIE:

Yes, I know the ending is different. Yes, I know some of you are very upset. I didn’t change it. The author has no control over the movie, and it was hard for me to accept too. However, there’s a great deal in the movie that I think is great, and I enjoyed watching it – and I hope you did too. Please don’t email me asking me why I changed the ending, or “let” Hollywood do that – it wasn’t something I had any control over. Tell Warner Brothers what YOU think ». —Jodi Picoult

so there you have it. my review (and rant) about the movie. all in all, if you haven’t read the book, it was a good movie. very touching, very beautiful. it’s gonna take me awhile to get used to the entirely different ending though. (and yes, i actually did tell warner brothers what i thought...)

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