New Age Nihilism at the Movies
My wife wanted to see the movie “My Sister’s Keeper”, which premiered yesterday, so we went to a Matinee. I have to admit that I wasn’t really looking forward to this movie, because I’m not really a fan of such movies. Even so, I went in with an open mind, because I’ve been surprised before. Unfortunately, the only surprise here was just how much New Age drivel was in this movie. Here’s my complete analysis, fair warning, this review contains spoilers, don’t read it if that bothers you.
***SPOILER ALERT***
First, the positives: Abigail Breslin is a very talented young actress, and on the whole, the movie is well acted. The writting is pretty good, and it is engaging. Now, the negatives: The movie is pretty well written, and engaging, thus it draws the viewer into its world, and its worldview. Herein lies the problem. The movie is strongly New Age, with a good stiff dose of nihilism thrown in for good measure. The movie begins with Abigail Breslin narrating. She explains that we’re all just accidents, that children are seldom the result of planning, except in the case of infertility. She explains that most often, children are the result of drunken carelessness and failed birth control. She, however is different, she was planned, in fact, she was engineered. Her parents had a doctor design her in a test tube to be an exact genetic match for her sister who is dying of cancer. OK, now you know the basic plot. God is completely absent in this movie, as is any sort of real religion. That is not to say that the characters worldviews don’t come through. We are told more than once that when we die, we “become a little bit of blue sky”. When the cancer-stricken girl is dying in the hospital at the end of the film, one of her aunts gives her a book saying, “It’s full of guided meditations… real healing stuff, it’s good for you”. Other relatives tell her to use the power of positive thinking to heal herself. “Command the cancer to leave your body”, they say. I guess that there is a certain realism to the characters, that is to say that you can imagine these events really happening. You’re supposed to walk away from this movie thinking nice happy thoughts, realizing that we’re here for a moment, then… nothing. “I wish I could tell you that some great good came from my sister’s death… but it didn’t”, says young Anna (Abigail Breslin), that about sums it up. The mother, played by Cameron Diaz, is amoral and overbearing, until she finds out that her 15-year-old daughter has had sex with her boyfriend, then she is morally outraged. Why, I’m not sure, because she has no qualms about genetically engineering a child for no reason other than to serve as a donor for her sister. The father, played by Jason Patric, is weak and passive, he demonstrates no leadership whatsoever in his family. The strongest force in the family for most of the movie is Sara (Diaz), who runs roughshod over the entire family, in her unyielding quest to save Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), by any means necessary. This results in the family’s oldest child, Jesse (Evan Ellingson), essentially being forgotten. His dislexia is basically untreated, and we meet him as a dropout. At one point, he misses his bus, and has to walk home from downtown LA late at night. He is worried about what kind of trouble he’l be in, but when he comes in, and is met by his father, the father assumes that he’s up because he can’t sleep for worrying about his sister Kate. So the two of them go off to spend the night at the hospital. The centerpiece of the film is the lawsuit brought by Anna Fitzgerald (Breslin) against her parents who are trying to force her to donate a kidney to her sister (Anna is 11-years-old). ***MAJOR SPOILER ALERT*** In the end, we find out that she is suing, not because “she wants to have control over her own body”, which she has maintained all along, but ather because her sister wants to die, and her parents won’t let her. Finally, Kate dies, Sara (the mother) goes back to her law practice, becoming a successful and wealthy attorney again, Brian (the father) quits his job as a firefighter, and becomes a mentor to inner-city youths (of course he never did start being a leader in his own family), and “best of all”, Jesse goes back to school, and gets into an art academy in New York. As for Kate, she died, no good came of it, no meaning was found in it, the world wasn’t changed, no new laws were passed, no great truths were uncovered, she just died, and “became a little bit of blue sky”. If I’m honest, I have to admit that by 1-hour into the movie, I was ready for her to die, and get it over with, by the end, I was ready to be sick. The New Age nonsense made me naseous, and the nihilism revealed in Kates death was the final straw. Oh, the family ends up taking a vacation to Montana every year on Kate’s birthday to remember her, but there’s no meaning in anything. What’s the message of this movie, there isn’t one, that’s the problem; it’s nothing but 109 minutes of wishy-washy, New Age, purposeless, emptiness. Of course that’s not what we’re supposed to see. We’re supposed to applaud the characters. We’re supposed to applaud Sara for being willing to do anything to save her daughter; we’re supposed to applaud Anna, because she fights for the right to control what happens to her own body; we’re supposed to applaud Kate, because she bravely fights cancer, finds love (sex), and bravely chooses to die when it’s her time; we’re supposed to applaud Jesse, because he goes back to school, and moves to New York, and we’re supposed to applaud Brian for, well I’m not really sure. We’re supposed to applaud, but I just can’t do it. A world with no God, no meaning, and no purpose, is a world that holds no appeal for me, but this is the world of this movie, and that’s supposed to be a good thing. All in all, this is a terrible movie, there’s really nothing else to say.
“My Sister’s Keeper” is rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, some disturbing images, sensuality, language and brief teen drinking.
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