Eagerly anticipating the release of My Sisters’ Keeper, I went to the theater to see the film the day it came out, June 25th. Unfortunately I am disappointed about the film adaptation of the dramatic novel. Having read the novel, and several other works by Jodi Picoult, I believe the movie fails to live up to the quality of the original story plot. While some minor details were changed, the most difficult one for me to deal with is the change in the movie’s ending. The end to the novel is unpredictable and ironic, but the movie ended extremely predictable (that is, if you hadn’t read the book and expected the written conclusion) and made the movie boring and depressing. With the plot surrounding a young girls battle with Leukemia and a family’s struggle to save her, Jodi Picoult did an ample job to lighten the mood of the plot with a wide range in character stories. The author included details about a relationship between the main character Anna (Abigail Breslin)’s attorney and her guardian ad litem. Picoult further describes the situations that Anna’s brother Jesse (Evan Ellingson) gets into rebelling from the tumultuous family-life he’s grown up in. These side-stories bring humor to the melancholy plot line. The movie completely ignores the relationship between attorney and guardian, and even eliminates the latter character completely. The film also barely acknowledges Jesse, but rather shows clips of him walking around out late at night, or smoking alone on a street corner. With these details eliminated from the movie, the plot becomes depressing and tragic, instead of creative and inspiring.
(Go to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1078588/synopsis for a full plot synopsis of My Sister Keeper-the movie, and http://litsum.com/my-sisters-keeper/ for a synopsis of the book.)
