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