The Memory Keeper's Daughter

One thing I don't like is when an author takes the time to ridicule other writers in his work. Stephen King has been guilty of this a few times, criticizing, among others, William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist) while oddly leaving the formulaic Dean Koontz alone.

In his recent short story collection King takes a swipe at the novel The Memory Keepers Daughter,using it to highlight the difference between the intelligent character - who couldn't get through it - and the comic foil husband who loved it.

Whatever. I didn't read the book, but Lisa did, and while she didn't rate it as high literature, she found it an enjoyable and interesting read.

Because she liked the book I rented the movie version from Netflix. It was pretty much as expected, a TV quality movie version of a tearjerker.

In the movie a respected and beloved doctor's wife gives birth to twins, a healthy boy and a girl with Downs Syndrome. As his wife passes out from the ordeal we are treated to a series of mystifying, silent flashbacks that lead the Doctor to give up his daughter to an orphanage and tell his wife she was stillborn.

We learn the flashbacks are of his own childhood, when the death of his sister broke his Mother's will to live. A fear the daughter will do the same to his wife serves as the alleged motives behind his actions. Here the novel has more time to dwell on the matter, and from what Lisa says it does a better job of justifying his feelings, but in the movie it doesn't ring true.

Anyhow, the nurse who's charged with taking the baby to the orphanage can't make herself do it, and adopts the baby as her own. For the next thirty years the Doctor lives with the knowledge that his daughter is alive and well, and as another bitter pill to swallow the guilt and shame has led to the destruction of his marriage and the alienation of his son.

The movie does a halfway decent job of redeeming the Doctor, who at heart is a good man and continues to become a better one as time goes on, and the idea of being so well and completely trapped by a single decision . . well, it's a terrifying thought.

As for the Mom,as portrayed she was a bit shallow for us to fully sympathize with her (and you'd think the audience would be 100% in her corner) and oddly, she doesn't appear to age at all in the thirty years that pass on the screen.

Not a bad movie.

2.5 out of 4.