I'm back-- the insurance guy was here today, looking at all the damage from the flood, so it looks like we are on our way to getting our master bedroom and family room back-- sometime in the next few weeks, hopefully.
For Movie Monday, I decided to write about this movie because I just watched it over the weekend. I read the book months and months ago and was completely disgusted with the ending. They changed the ending for the movie-- Hollywood knew there was no way the original ending could fly-- but I'm not sure I was any happier with how they ended it. Maybe there just was no good ending for this story.
For those of you who don't know the premise, Anna (who is now 11) was genetically engineered and conceived so that she could give her cord blood to her 4 year old sister, Kate, who had leukemia. But things didn't stop there-- she ended up with 8 hospitalizations in 11 years for bone marrow transplants, etc. Things come to a head when her mother expects her to donate a kidney to Kate and Anna doesn't want to do that. She gets a lawyer and sues her parents for medical emancipation.
It's a heartwrenching scenario (my husband cried as he watched the movie, then told me I never get to pick our Saturday night DVD again), especially as you understand that without the kidney, Kate will die. At the same time, though, there's tons of sympathy for Anna who has suffered through horrible, horrible things from the time she was two, just to be a donor to Kate. Picoult, of course, has some twists in the book, and the ending I so objected to was that as Anna wins medical emancipation, she is on her way to the hospital to see her sister, ends up in a car accident, is brain dead, and they harvest her kidneys anyway. It's like everything we felt in the entire book-- all the struggles that Anna goes through-- are negated in the end.
As I said, the movie ends differently (I won't ruin it for you) but I didn't find the new ending any more satisfactory. I've spent a couple days thinking how I would end it, and haven't been able to come up with an answer either, though, so maybe there really was no good ending for this story.
So, what do you think? Any of you see the movie? If not, is there any book turned into a movie that you really liked both versions of? For me, I really liked both the movie and film version of The Firm and Angels and Demons.
I did not see the movie because I know the ending is different, and I loved the book. So for me, it was not something I wanted to see. Not to mention the fact that I cried more during that book than should even be possible. That was my first Jodi Picoult book, and it was so emotionally overwhelming!
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