My Sisters Keeper

Blog #3

My Sisters Keeper

               Has anyone seen the movie My Sister’s Keeper? It’s about a girl, Anna, whose sister gets cancer at a young age and the whole reason that Anna is born is to give her sister parts of her body. Starting after her birth, she gives her sister cord blood and next she’s five giving her lymphocytes. There are several times in her childhood where she is required by her parents to give to her sister. She’s 12 or 13 when her parents tell her that her sister needs a kidney. So this pre-teen has had enough of giving her (forever recovering) sister body parts and finds herself a lawyer. In the book she saved around $130 and in the movie it’s more like $600 or $700. So in the book Anna does a few odd jobs to make the lawyer take her case. In the movie he takes the case out of charity. Sure that’s a subtle difference but there are other things about the lawyer that were left out. The lawyer has a dog named Judge that is a service dog and no one knows what the dog really does until the end. In the book there are several times when the lawyer makes up stories about what kind of service the dog does for him. He says the dog detects magnets because he has an iron lung. This I the only lie referenced in the movie. So it’s almost a complete shock to the audience at the end when the dog is actually doing his job (I won’t spoil it). The lawyers’ love life is also a huge part of the book but it wasn’t even referenced once in the movie.

               Another change, book to movie, was when talking about Anna and her leukemic sisters’ brother. He’s older, in both, but he is only a problem child in the movie. In the book there is a lot more to his problems. He’s an alcoholic because his parents were too busy helping the sick sister that they didn’t pay attention to him. Another point to be made is that their father is a firefighter (both movie and book). The reason this is important, only in the book, is because the brother likes to start fires in abandoned buildings. Anytime the sister was in the hospital for long periods of time, the brother would set fire to a building. Of course you find this out near the end of the book, that all the fires were started by the brother. In the movie they play his problems off to be severe dyslexia. The whole role is altered in the movie, or so it seemed.

               With all these differences, I thought, “how much different could the movie really get after all this?” Well in the movie they make it seem like the sick sister, Kate, loves Montana. This was never referenced in the book. Kate feels that when she dies she wants to go to Montana. Now this is another difference. Kate seems to hint, several times in the movie, that she is ready to die. I hate to spoil the ending of the movie but I feel it’s necessary to point out how different the two really are. In the movie, Anna’s secret purpose in going to a lawyer for rights to her body is to let her sister die. She did it because that’s what her sister wants and what her sister asked her to do. In the book, it’s what Anna wants and it gets better. She wins her case and, in the end, Anna gets in a car crash right after her case. She gets put in intensive care and dies. At that point the lawyer has rights to Anna’s body/organs. Knowing Kate needs Anna’s kidney or she will die and how Anna felt about giving her kidney to her sister.. What does he decide to do with her organs? Well if you ask I’ll tell you but really.. you should read the book. Happy reading and watching everyone!!