The Family Stone...A Light Fake

The Family Stone is this holiday season’s dysfunctional family dramedy, straight from the Hollywood studio system’s assembly line of films targeted to middle America. Hollywood, ever-ready to make a profit, has delivered this middle-brow production as a way to help cure its summer and fall box-office crisis, and they will most likely succeed. However, this is not to suggest that The Family Stone is a good film. This overwrought, sweet-as-saccharine, and ultimately disingenuous fare is complete with Diane Keaton, imitating every grin and smile from her performances in The Father of the Bride films and Sara Jessica Parker, who looks as though she just completed a course in method acting from Columbia University. The latter is “against-type” casting that…well never quite works until Parker adopts her Sex and the City proclivities in a predictable plot development.

The rest of the cast and characters range in notoriety, and most of them portray members of the Stone family. The Stones consist of people embodying traits from characters from every other dysfunctional family drama to hit theaters including Craig T. Nelson as the sane and sensible patriarch, Rachel McAdams as the angry, liberal intellectual, and Luke Wilson as a Southern Californian bohemian. The one exception is Thad (Ty Giordano), the son who is deaf and gay and who also has a partner who is African American. The middle class Stone family gathers every Christmas, and this year the oldest son Everett, played by Dermot Mulroney, is intent on introducing the woman in his life (Parker) and proposing to her by offering her the family “stone.”

The film even includes an obligatory dinner scene in which the matriarch dresses down the guest who doesn’t wear the same political correctness stripes as everyone else in the room. The film takes approximately five minutes to address the issue of homosexuality during the dinner and even less time to address the issue of race. The filmmakers either don’t care about these issues at all, or they don’t believe a general American audience can tolerate a more substantive discussion of these issues. If the latter is more true than the former, then why raise them in the film at all?

At the beginning of the film, Parker’s Meredith wears her hair in a bun. She’s an uptight corporate type and the filmmakers want us to see that the more conservative hairstyle conveys this. She and Everett are equity analysts for Wall Street firms, and the Stone family doesn’t understand Everett’s disdain for their mundane, suburban existence. The family, on the other hand, doesn’t understand what there isn’t to like about them and what he sees in Meredith. The uptight Meredith is so beside herself that she calls her sister (Claire Danes) to join her as she tries to survive a holiday weekend with “the family.” The younger sister arrives and falls off of the bus upon seeing Everett in one of the scene’s many cheap laughs. Any viewer can guess why this happens by watching the previews of the film, the amount of laughter this pratfall generates from American audiences, and what transpires.

Everything about The Family Stone is contrived and controlled to reach a desired end. There are almost no genuine moments in the film. Writer/director Thomas Bezucha, a creator of Craig T. Nelson’s Coach, never lets the camera linger long enough on any performer to elicit authentic emotions from its actors or the audience. From the opening moments, the film tips its hand as to the direction it is heading with one of its central relationships, leaving the unfortunate impression that it and all other parts of The Family Stone are complete and utter fakes.

Grade: C

Serious Syriana Thought-Provoking Cinema

Syriana, the bold new drama about oil and the geopolitical conditions that determine its distribution and use, is as purposeful as any film this year. It’s a film of great importance and one whose relevance grows with each scene. Its opening half hour presents seemingly disparate characters such as a Washington DC attorney (Jeffrey Wright) who has been hired to clear the legal hurdle for a merger between two oil conglomerates; an American energy industry analyst (Matt Damon) who works for a Middle Eastern family’s oil empire; a pair of poor, wide-eyed Muslim workers; two Iraqi brothers vying to become the rightful heir to their father’s throne; and a veteran CIA operative (George Clooney) who must outfox U.S. government officials and blackhearted businessmen for his own survival.

Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Traffic, has written and directed Syriana with impressive insights. To some degree, it is a studied and well-researched film. It is not so much concerned with the characters as it is with the ideas that they espouse. Although Syriana lacks the narrative clarity and force of Traffic, its plot is even more intricate, its subject matter every bit as unsettling, and its impact even more immediate. Gaghan intentionally presents each situation as if they have no relationship to any other in the film and then takes his time unveiling how they are connected. Each of the scenes carefully builds upon one another, culminating to a conclusion that makes the film both an indictment of U.S. foreign policy and capitalism and a panoramic view of the moral and political ambiguities that inevitably surface in the global war over oil, money, and power.

The film includes a host of terrific supporting performances. Christopher Plummer is calm and calculating as a business mogul who will stop at nothing to protect his interests. Chris Cooper is the sly, opportunistic Texas millionaire who stands to gain or lose a lot depending on whether or not the merger between two oil companies is approved. Amanda Peet is near perfect as Matt Damon’s wife, who pays a dear price as she grapples with his involvement with a Middle Eastern Prince and his empire. George Clooney, packing an additional thirty pounds and a full beard, delivers a potentially Award-winning turn as the desperate CIA operative who may not be the asset to the U.S. government he once was.

As powerful and as provocative as Syriana is, it stops just short of challenging U.S. viewers to ponder their own individual responsibilities for using oil responsibly. To be sure, the film serves as a potent, pointed liberal-message movie that is sure to lead viewers to criticize U.S. policies and motives for occupation in the Middle East. Yet the film’s distant, journalistic tone prevents it from igniting the fervor needed for the systemic and revolutionary change that the film so earnestly demands.

Grade: A-

Movie News and Notes

The National Board of Review recently announced its list of top films. The list included Matchpoint, Brokeback Mountain, Walk the Line, Munich, Good Night and Good Luck.

Lara Linney and Jeff Daniels who star in The Squid and the Whale are strong Oscar contenders, according to several major publications.

Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives) is receiving accolades for her performance in Transamerica. She portrays a man, who while in the midst of having a sex change, meets his long, lost son.

Early Oscar favorite Memoirs of a Geisha has received surprisingly mixed reviews in Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times. It was directed by Rob Marshall, who won an Oscar for Chicago a couple of years ago.

Scarlett Johanson is co-starring in Matchpoint, the first of Woody Allen's three films in London is reportedly creating quite a name for herself there.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Grizzly Man, the well-received documentary about a bear enthusiast who was ultimately killed by a bear, was not among the films eligible to receive an Oscar nomination in that category.

Wolfgang Peterson has been tapped to direct a remake of the 1972 disaster classic The Poseidon Adventure. Studio executives may take a look at the ratings of the recent television remake, which captured the attention of a mere 9 million viewers.

Longtime film critic Rex Reed, still entertaining, called King Kong "a bloated mess" in a review. The film has received almost uniformly positive reviews.