DRAMA, WROTE CLASSICAL-GREEK TEXTBOOK AUTHOR
Aristotle, is supposed to evoke "pity and fear." Sounds harsh, dude. These days, mainstream American cinema is a gated community, and such powerful feelings don't get past the guardhouse. This week's example of locked-down melodrama is My Sister's Keeper. Director and co-writer Nick (The Notebook) Cassavetes's tale of death and betrayal might summon a few sniffles, but contains nothing that could seriously disturb sensibilities, or depress ticket sales.

Adapted from Jodi Picoult's novel — although stripped of its ghastly twist ending — My Sister's Keeper chronicles a typical Hollywood-movie family: The five Fitzgeralds are movie-star attractive, awash in affection and empathy, and remarkably affluent. Somehow, the clan lives in a big house in budget-busting L.A. on the salary of a fireman, Brian (Jason Patric). Sara (Cameron Diaz) used to be a power-suit lawyer, but she quit when toddler daughter Kate was diagnosed with leukemia. Her daughter's survival is her full-time case.

That's problem #1 in this conflict-free problem drama, which begins about 12 years after Kate's diagnosis. Problem #2 is Anna (Abigail Breslin), the couple's third child, who was conceived specifically to provide spare parts for Kate (Sofia Vassilieva). Anna's cord blood, bone marrow, and other donations have kept Kate alive, but now she needs a kidney. Anna says she doesn't want to be the donor, and hires an as-seen-on-TV attorney (Alec Baldwin) to get her "medically emancipated."

Some people may be surprised, as the movie intends, when they learn that problem #2 doesn't exist. All the Fitzgeralds really want the same thing, so there's no strife. (Well, Sara takes a little convincing, but it's not difficult.) But even viewers who don't guess the switcheroo before it arrives probably won't be emotionally startled, because the movie is bleached of feeling. Sure, it's sad to contemplate the death of a 15-year-old (well, most 15-year-olds), but sometimes dying is preferable to life in the limbo of the ICU. And when everyone on screen is floating in a limpid pool of acceptance, it's hard to feel much alarm.

The irony is that My Sister's Keeper, being a contemporary American movie, is fairly candid about physical agony and decay. We see blood, vomit, and blotchy, bruised skin. We watch a little girl's spinal tap, and hear about the death of a minor character. Slasher flicks have prepared us to perceive bodily injury as routine. What has been completely anesthetized is emotional pain.

It's not necessary to "spoil" the plot to illustrate this. In one scene, Brian agrees to take Kate to the beach, with her doctor's tacit consent. When overprotective Sara learns of the excursion, she freaks. The two parents yell at each other, and at their top of the lungs agree to divorce. Of course, a few cinematic moments later, mom arrives at the beach where the other four members of the family are having a great time. (The other Fitzgerald is big brother Jesse, a tiny subplot of a lad.) Sara snuggles with Kate, and everything is fine.

This reconciliation has no impact, partially because it's just another nice family moment in a movie that's stuffed with them. But it also means nothing because Brian and Sara's fight had no tangible passion. They got louder, but they remained the same shiny happy people they are throughout the movie. (Off screen, not all disagreements are settled, cozily or otherwise.) Likability is everything in today's Hollywood, and Diaz and Patric aren't about to sacrifice it to a simulation of genuine hostility — not that they were probably asked to do so. This is Nick Cassavetes, after all, not John.

There's another reason why My Sister's Keeper drifts free of human emotion. The narrative is a loose weave of yesterday and today, with flashbacks that last so long they undermine the sense of chronology. Kate may be dying in the "present," but when's that? The movie offers a vision of life not as "a place where nothing ever happens" — as the soundtrack's jazzy Talking Heads cover suggests — but as a place where everything is happening at once. And that's one notion of immortality.

The weirdly distancing flashbacks suggest an avant-garde film, something along the lines of a Alain Resnais classic. But Resnais shattered past and present to create a new kind of quasi-political drama, where the crimes of Nazis (Night and Fog) or the French in Algeria (Muriel) can never really end. Cassavetes, unsurprisingly, does the opposite. He conjures a world where, somewhere, everything is fine.

That's a self-defeating vibe for a tale of pain and loss, but Hollywood no longer deals in such downers — and neither does American culture, if it can help it. (Talk radio doesn't count.) My Sister's Keeper has a few specifically new-age moments, and even one scene where such sentiments are explicitly lampooned, but its whole outlook is Aquarian-age. This movie comes from a tranquilized neverland where nothing, not even mortality, is more important than being rich, pretty, and nice.

MY SISTER'S KEEPER — 2009, 109 min; at all the lovely, upscale megaplexes.