Movie Review: The Family Stone
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What Parents Should Know
Parents should know that the film focuses on family tensions
emerging when grown children come home for the Christmas
holidays. Characters argue and pout; brothers fight, causing
black eyes and cut cheeks. Characters drink at a bar, to the
point that one passes out and doesn't remember how she ends up
in her fiancé's brother's bed. One character is accused of
racism, homophobia, and general "uptightness." While it's
mainly comedic, the movie also includes a plot thread where a
character is dying of cancer (brief glimpse of her mastectomy
scar).
Families can talk about the family relationships. How do the kids' behaviors resemble their parents'? How do the Stones come to see their presumed open-mindedness as insular and judgmental? How might Meredith's transformation from tense to sociable (here pushed along by a night of drinking), be achieved in a less stereotypical way?
Common Sense Media Review
Thomas Bezucha's THE FAMILY STONE means well and offers fine
performances, but is in the end tripped up by
holiday-family-gathering movie clichés. The
liberal-leaning, self-congratulating Stones are addled when
good boy Everett (Dermot Mulroney) brings home a bad
fiancée. Granted, Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) doesn't
mean to be bad. In fact, she tries very hard to be liked. She's
not scheming or mean-spirited or even particularly
anti-liberal. She's just tense, fretful, and sometimes
ignorant.
This makes her a target for the free-thinking Stones, whose first representatives on screen are son Thad (Tyrone Giordano) and his partner Patrick (Brian J. White). Thad happens to be deaf and Patrick happens to be black, and both happen to be securely and radiantly gay. Inside the Stone home, Sybil (Diane Keaton) and Kelly (Craig T. Nelson) are thrilled to see the kids as they tumble in, from Thad and Patrick to pregnant Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) and her charmingly brainy daughter Elizabeth (Savannah Stehlin) to laidback, pot-smoking documentary filmmaker Ben (Luke Wilson) to the wittily "mean one," Amy (Rachel McAdams), who arrives with a laundry basket full of dirty clothes and her NPR bag on her shoulder.
Before such judges, every word Meredith speaks seems to indict her. She refuses to sleep in Everett's old bedroom with him and feels out of place because she can't sign like everyone else. When Meredith reveals that she doesn't see "gay" as "normal," the family turns against her. Only Ben sticks up for her, taking her to a local dive where she can drink beers, listen to the jukebox, and literally let her hair down. He encourages her: "You have the freak flag, you just don't fly it."
Flying that flag will prove Meredith's salvation. "I'm just as good as any of you," she protests during a sloppy, Christmas day showdown in the kitchen. "Better, probably," sighs Sybil. The point isn't really measuring up, though this is, of course, the presumption of Christmas-family-gathering movies. While it provides pleasurable moments (Susannah watching Judy Garland sing in Meet Me in St. Louis on TV, Brad finding the perfect gift for Amy), The Family Stone is, finally, less brave than Meredith, resorting at last to cookie-cutter resolutions like slapsticky fights and everyone's-happy couplings. Families looking for Christmas family movies for younger kids might prefer The Santa Clause or even any of the Home Alone movies.
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
