REVIEW: Be warned: intelligent 'Keeper' is a weeper

"My Sister's Keeper" is the sort of film that requires a pre-film checklist.

Overpriced soda? Check.

Overpriced popcorn? Check.

Pocketful of tissues? Check.

Based on the book by best-selling author Jodi Picoult, "My Sister's Keeper" is directed by Nick Cassavetes, who collaborated on the script with Jeremy Leven; both of whom were most recently responsible for opening the sluices of your tear ducts in "The Notebook."

This should not be seen as an indictment (though, it surely will be by some critics); as tragedy and tears are a part of life, they should also be a part of our entertainment. If "My Sister's Keeper" feels melodramatic and contrived, it is at least sincerely so.

When Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric) got married, they never imagined they would face every parent's worst nightmare, the catastrophic illness of a child. When their daughter Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) is diagnosed with leukemia, they are told her only hope for survival lies in finding a compatible bone marrow donator.

With none in sight, Sara and Brian conceive another child, Anna (Abigail Breslin) - after precise genetic manipulation in a test tube - who is a perfect genetic match.

But what seemed like an unassailable and even imperative decision at the time returns to haunt them when 11-year-old Anna sues her parents for emancipation, fed up with being little more than spare parts for her older sister's increasingly precarious health. (Alec Baldwin provides some welcome levity as the pompous attorney Anna hires because of his tacky television commercials.)

It is a decision that shatters the already-tenuous bond holding the once-happy family together, and challenges everyone's idea about what constitutes true love and loyalty.

Melodramatic or not, the actors play their parts with open-faced earnestness. Breslin, who's been growing up before our eyes, gets a rare chance to play someone somewhat unsympathetic. She proves more than competent at the job, but she's upstaged by Vassilieva, who almost always maintains an angelic smile and a wickedly dark sense of humor, even in the face of imminent death.

A bit in which she falls in love with a fellow cancer patient (Thomas Dekker) is particularly affecting.

While Patric makes us wonder where he's been hiding lately and Joan Cusack takes a moving turn as a judge, it is Diaz, making a rare dramatic turn, who is given the heavy emotional lifting.

Diaz's matriarch is so strong she forgets to be vulnerable, so engaged in the battle for her daughter's life that she's forgets to tend to her own wounds or the wounds of the very person for whom she's gone to war.

Refusing both negativity and reality, Diaz's Sara is the sort of tour-de-force you want on your side, but hamstrung by the very things that make her admirable. She is remarkably vanity-free, going so far as to shave her head in sympathy with her chemotherapy-battered daughter.

Audiences, and particularly parents, need to know what they're getting themselves into.

Inherently, though not malevolently manipulative, "My Sister's Keeper" presents life with cancer in all of its excruciating agony.

It can be harrowing, traumatic viewing. In the end, the movie isn't about an agonizing court battle. In fact, as the film goes on, we discover the litigation that starts off the action is more of a subplot, what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin.

"My Sister's Keeper" is much more interested in spending time with the family members as they wrestle through the surprisingly difficult and thought-provoking ethical questions that are presented with intelligence and insight.

Unfortunately, the movie side-steps answering those questions at the last moment, hoping you're too distracted by your Kleenex to notice. (The movie changes the book's ending, a denouement that would have certainly been more complicated and chat-worthy, but also far more artificial, implausible and melodramatic.)

My Sister's Keeper

Cast: Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin, Jason Patric, Sofia Vassilieva, Alec Baldwin
Director: Nick Cassavetes
Theaters: Hollywood, Tinseltown, Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark
Rated: PG-13 (mature thematic content, some disturbing images, sensuality, language, brief teen drinking)
Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

GRADE: B