The Family Stone
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Rated: PG-13
Website: http://www.thefamilystonemovie.com/
Release Date: 2005-12-16
Cast: Dermot Mulroney, Diane Keaton, Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Rachel McAdams
Director: Thomas Bezucha
Screenwriter: Thomas Bezucha
Music Score: Michael Giacchino
WorkNameSort: Family Stone, The
Our Rating: 3.00

That movie poster with the big, extended middle finger would seem to indicate that The Family Stone is this year’s evil holiday picture for togetherness-shunning Grinches. But it’s not evil, really; just as confused and dysfunctional as the beyond-awkward get-together it chronicles.

Forget about finding someone to champion when Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) brings his girlfriend, Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker), home to meet his parents and siblings. Sure, Meredith is a standoffish affection-phobic who probably irons her underwear. But Stone matriarch Sybil (Diane Keaton) is just as annoying in her mouthy free-spiritedness, and dad Kelly’s (Craig T. Nelson) admonition that everyone should play nice with Meredith rings hollow when he allows Everett’s hostile sister (Rachel McAdams) to bait and insult their guest with contemptuous relish.

Meredith isn’t a New England liberal like the Stones, see, so we’re supposed to view distrusting her as natural and pitying her the highest form of charity. Instead, we end up feeling sorry for her – until she offends the entire family with a dinner-table outburst that’s unbelievably callous. By that point, there’s no choice but to abandon reason and hate everybody.

But that approach only works in black comedy, a designation for which The Family Stone isn’t exaggerated (or funny) enough to qualify. And writer-director Thomas Bezucha –whose hopeful gay romance Big Eden won an audience award at the 2001 Florida Film Festival – practices creative favoritism by making one of Everett’s brothers not only queer but hearing-impaired and saintly, complete with an equally perfect black boyfriend. Go ahead and loathe them most of all; they’re not even characters, just signifiers.

The rub is that his cast has provided Bezucha with some really fine ensemble acting. Despite the malformed characters and wandering motivation, bracingly affecting line readings and other conduits of pith abound. At repeated junctures, you can feel the movie trying to become something genuine – something insightful and unencumbered by self-amusement. And it almost gets there. In the aggregate, though, it’s a fractious Christmas spent with unpleasant relatives you’d rather avoid. Like you need to pay nine bucks to experience that.

This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2005.