My Sister's Keeper

OK, the title of this review may be a bit misleading. I titled it as such because this film hits me so close to home, but in my case it would be My Brother's Keeper. There are so many scenes in this film that parallel very closely or often exactly the situations my spouse and I have been dealing with for the last 25 or more years it made watching this film almost an additional helping of our reality. The rollercoaster ride from lucid to delusional, the resentment, the heaping of guilt, the unknowing of what you are going to get from one conversation to the next, I could go on and on.

A couple of complaints I will lodge probably reflect more on our situation than the film. First the portrayal of the social worker involvement was somewhat overdone or maybe that was nearer to the experience they were trying to reflect. We also thought the ratio of lucid to delusional was skewed to heavily toward lucid. Finally even though Kathy Bates handled the back and forth required to play this role, I thought she spoke a little to quickly to be a believable schizo-affective/bipolar person. In our experiences many persons affected with these disorders are deliberate and look at you while they process the conversation and then communicate their thoughts. Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys they are not.

This film just scratches the surface of dealing with a family member with a mental illness, but it does so without being too depressing.