Some people don’t like to cry in public but have no qualms about letting it all out in the privacy of their own living rooms. These are the people who will most enjoy My Sister’s Keeper on DVD.

In a way, you have to respect a film that so unabashedly wears its intentions on its sleeve. The sadness is so apparent even from the opening scenes, you know the film isn’t going to attempt to trick you into thinking everything will turn out OK for cancer-stricken teenager Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) and her weary, conflicted family. It’s directed by Nick Cassavetes, the master manipulator of emotions who also gave us The Notebook (aka this decade’s Titanic). But in The Notebook, Cassavetes and co-screenwriter Jeremy Leven had the liberty of taking the audience out of the depressing nursing home the characters inhabited to enchant us with the passionate story of how their lifelong love affair began. In My Sister’s Keeper, they’re dealing with childhood cancer. And while there is a tender, well-acted romantic subplot for Kate and a fellow patient, the story never has a chance to lift us up before the ending brings us down. (Speaking of that ending, prepare to be shocked if you’re expecting it to resemble what happened in the Jodi Picoult novel the film is based on.)

And even though Cassavettes may be tackling weightier material than he did with The Notebook, he doesn’t dig deep enough into the meaty ethical question the film’s premise raises: how much freedom should children be given to make decisions about their own bodies? This is the stuff you saw in the trailers when the film came out last summer — Kate’s sister Anna (Abigail Breslin), who was conceived by her desperate parents (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric) to be a genetic match for their sick eldest daughter, now wants to sue for “medical emancipation.” She’s tired of donating her spare parts to her sister and wants to protect her own body in case she ever wants to take up cheerleading or have children. She hires the lawyer with the best TV commercials (Alec Baldwin, who now seems incapable of keeping Jack Donaghy out of any other roles he plays) and sets about tearing her family apart. But instead of mining the drama of this latest development, the film spends too much time in the past, telling us the story of what it was like to grow up with a sick child in the family. It’s heartbreaking stuff, but nothing that hasn’t been done on film before. And for every scene of genuine emotion (Diaz and Patric trying to sell their son on the merits of going away to a special needs school to help his dyslexia — and failing to hide the obvious truth that they’re sending him away because they just don’t have time to deal with him), there are a million important plot developments that are glossed over (we’re told all of this has taken a toll on the parents’ marriage, but see little evidence of it). The story ends up being told mostly through voice-overs, many of which are performed in the soft, condescending tones actors use when they appear with sick kids in PSAs for charity organizations. When the film finally comes to an end (without ever attempting to answer the questions raised by Anna’s lawsuit), the tears come, but you can’t help feeling that you’ve been manipulated rather than truly moved.

Special features on the disc are limited to 15 minutes of deleted scenes, just in case there’s still some water left behind your eyes.

My Sister’s Keeper is available now from Warner Home Video.

Tags: cameron diaz, dvd reviews, my sister's keeper