Review of The Family Stone (2005) by Markb. — 05 Jan 2006

Trite plotting, uneven performances, seriously misplaced editorial sympathies and wildly miscalculated attitudinizing cause writer-director Thomas Bezucha's would-be hilarious and heartwarming holiday-centered comedy-drama to.

..well, sink like a stone. Hidebound, somewhat uptight corporate supervisor Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), who's established in the opening scenes as a Scrooge simply for making some tough calls that ANY businessperson would normally have to make during the Christmas season, visits her fiance's 1960s-throwback, let-it-all-hang-out family, and that's what the movie's central problem starts: neither they nor Bezucha even make a pretense at giving her a chance.

As played by Parker, Meredith stuck me as a little high-strung, maybe trying a bit too hard, but fundamentally a decent, well-meaning person whose main flaw (besides, in Bezucha's view, letting her subscription to The Politically Correct Newsletter lapse) is that she doesn't seem to find the most socially acceptable phrasings in order to voice opinions that she and many, many Americans have every right to have and express, and yet the Stones treat her as rudely and judgementally as Robert DeNiro did Ben Stiller in the Meet the Parents movies.

(At least the makers of THOSE films were clearly sympathetic to Stiller, and at least Blythe Danner was there as a tempering force.) Some posters on this site have commented that this a movie that blue-staters will love and red-staters hate, and that's precisely the problem: look, I'm a moderate Democrat who loves Michael Moore, detests Wal-Mart and mostly agrees with John Murtha's recent Iraq stance, but I also know that just as the current pendulum swing of excessive anti-tobacco laws treating smokers as social pariahs resulted largely from their callous disregard for nonsmokers' rights and comforts, so also the extreme popularity of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Fox News is in large part the result of an often all-too-true perception on the part of good, decent conservatives that liberals patronizingly treat them as social and intellectual Neanderthals.

It's interesting and ironic to observe that another current holiday release, the not-as-controversial-as-anyone-predicted Brokeback Mountain, may actually be bringing some members of opposing political and social factions together in honest, courteous discussion and debate because it treats all of its characters fairly (and because many moviegoers, regardless of their viewponts on homosexuality, simply love a good weeper), while this movie, in its insistence that Meredith needs to change her views rather than having the Stones treat her with the respect, dignity and decency that a guest, a future family member and a human being warrants, may be driving people apart.

Of course, some of this may be attributed to Parker's deservedly Golden Globe-nominated portrayal; she obviously doesn't see Meredith as a one-dimensional ninny, but imbues her with the same measure of empathy that she regularly brought to her signature character, the much-loved Carrie Bradshaw of TV's Sex and the City.

And even though this movie includes one of those tireder-than-tired sequences where a character permanently drops all her inhibitions after being treated to an aquariumful of brew, Parker's Dos Equis-fueled bunny hop to Maxine Nightingale's hit "Right Back Where We Started From" was about the cutest thing I've seen in a non-animated feature film since Jennifer Garner's extended dance number to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" about a year and a half ago.

As far as the rest of the cast goes, Diane Keaton, Craig T. Nelson and Luke Wilson acquit themselves honorably; you can't blame Bezucha for yet another humorless, one-note Dermot Mulroney performance (as Parker's betrothed), but I'll do exactly that for getting a completely colorless one out of Claire Danes (especially after being so luminous in Shopgirl) and the first really bad one ever in the heretofore perfect career of Rachel McAdams (Red Eye, The Notebook) as a snotty younger sister.

Oh, yes, let's not forget: The Family Stone throws in that old standby, a fatal disease, in order to give all this some Deeper Meaning. All it ends up doing, besides leading up to the most predictable final shot in years, is prove that while Wilson's character contends that Parker's "needs to fly (her) freak flag", Bezucha obviously kept his originality flag folded up, locked in a drawer, and completely out of view throughout.