On falling in love with The Family Stone
This Christmas, give the divisive 2005 romantic comedy a second chance
Image: Graphic: Libby McGuire Film Features The Family Stone
Screenshot: The Family Stone
If I’ve come up with a grand thesis over the past four years of writing about romantic comedies for this column, it’s that I genuinely think people watch rom-coms differently than they watch other movies. They either go in with their hackles raised, ready to mock the plot swerves that exist outside of the realm of realism, or they watch them passively, automatically assuming there’s little meat on their bones. And while experiencing a romantic comedy in either of these ways can be perfectly enjoyable, doing so often means missing out on the details and intentions that fuel the genre at its best. I should know, because I’m guilty of doing just that to The Family Stone.
The second most divisive Christmas romance after Love Actually, The Family Stone earned mixed reviews on its release but enjoyed a solid box office showing and has only grown in esteem over the past 16 years. Many now consider it part of the contemporary Christmas canon. And while past viewings of The Family Stone never really did it for me, the film sprang to life when I rewatched it more closely for this column. This time around, I came to appreciate the intentionally thorny things it’s attempting to explore, as well as the Christmas magic it purposefully (if only semi-successfully) deploys with its sister-swapping love stories. I get why The Family Stone is something of an acquired taste, but I also think it’s one worth acquiring.
At its heart, The Family Stone is a movie about how horrible it is to be judged and how fun it can be to do the judging. Uptight Manhattan careerist Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker) really does try her best to make nice with the family of her boyfriend, Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney). But she’s reserved, meticulous, and socially awkward in a way that’s naturally off-putting. The Family Stone can be uncomfortable viewing because big chunks of it just ask you to watch Meredith be very, very bad at things: small talk, charades, backing down from an argument when she’s clearly in the wrong. For all her outward elegance, Meredith is completely lacking in social grace. And if there’s one thing the loosely bohemian, casually intellectual Stone family hates, it’s stuffy formality.
The Stones, meanwhile, are the sort of cliquey clan that’s terrifying from the outside but wonderful to be a part of. What immediately jumps out is how physically affectionate they are with one another. There’s this moment where they’re catching up around the kitchen table and laid-back older brother Ben (Luke Wilson) casually pulls his younger brother Thad (Tyrone Giordano) onto his lap. It’s a pitch-perfect depiction of loving adult siblinghood, and the sort of little touch you rarely see in big studio rom-coms of the 2000s, which often have a clinical quality to their staging. The best thing writer/director Thomas Bezucha brings to The Family Stone is a casual, lived-in quality that carries over from the cozy costuming to the chummy physical blocking to the fantastic production design of the Stone family home.
Chief in both disheveled chic and Stone family judgment is Rachel McAdams as younger sister Amy. It’s the performance that even those who dislike The Family Stone tend to agree is the best thing about the movie. She’s based on Bezucha’s sister, whose own experience bringing home a dud of a boyfriend is what inspired the movie in the first place. Just as Ben has inherited his wonderful sense of warmth from Stone family patriarch Kelly (Craig T. Nelson), Amy has clearly inherited her passive aggressive sense of humor from matriarch Sybil (Diane Keaton). A big part of what makes The Family Stone special is that Bezucha seems to have an understanding of the family’s dynamics that stretch far beyond what’s explicitly laid out on the page.
There’s almost a sleight of hand to the way Bezucha is able to give each member of his massive ensemble their only meaningful place in the puzzle. Though it doesn’t serve any narrative purpose, Bezucha takes time for a sweetly melancholy late-night scene where Kelly checks in on his pregnant, peacemaker oldest daughter, Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser), who seems to be juggling more than anyone but him notices. Elsewhere, Ben and his niece (Savannah Stehlin) share a charmingly playful dynamic that mostly just unfolds in the background of big group scenes. Thad’s partner, Patrick (Brian J. White), meanwhile, has the ease of someone fully enmeshed in the Stone clan, but also the empathy of someone who had to go through his own trial-by-fire to get there. Because Thad is deaf and the Stones regularly sign, entering their home is like stepping into a new world where you literally don’t always speak the language.
All that attention to detail pays off in the second act reveal that Sybil’s breast cancer has returned and this will likely be her last Christmas with the family. It’s a swerve towards heavier material that throws a lot of viewers off, particularly since the film was marketed as more of an out-and-out comedy. But there’s something appreciably bold about Bezucha’s attempt to pioneer the “tragicomic Christmas screwball romance” genre. For all the film’s broader physical comedy, Bezucha ensures that each of the five Stone siblings get a meaningful moment with their mom, too, including Sybil’s showier speeches to Everett and Thad, and the small moment when Susannah quietly cuddles up to her mom while she’s napping. Maybe most moving of all is the scene where Meredith gifts the family with an old photo of a pregnant Sybil, who looks up at Amy to say, simply, “That’s you and me, kid. You and me.”
Sybil’s illness also helps explain why the Stone family are desperate for someone to aim all their pent-up frustration and anger at, too. There’s a through line of trauma and grief here that becomes clearer with rewatches. Where the movie stumbles a bit, however, is in trying to balance that heavier core with its lighter rom-com moments. The thing that always trips me up is the addition of Meredith’s little sister, Julie (Claire Danes), who gets called in as emotional support during Meredith’s moment of crisis. Though you’d think the film would use Julie to humanize Meredith and offer a different family dynamic for comparison, the Morton sister relationship actually winds up feeling almost incidental. Instead, Julie’s arrival is Bezucha’s convoluted way of giving Everett a new love interest as Meredith starts falling for Ben.
The trouble is, the Everett/Julie romance hinges on the sort of magic, love-at-first sight connection that would be a tricky sell for any romantic comedy, let alone one that’s also kind of trying to be a grounded ensemble drama and occasional cringe-comedy. Whatever “opposites attract” thing Bezucha is going for doesn’t work with Julie and Everett, mostly because they both seem too flighty and noncommittal to be a functioning couple. And getting the audience to root for their romance is a big ask considering he starts the movie ready to get engaged to her sister and she doesn’t even enter the story until over a third of the way through.
The Meredith/Ben stuff is better, if only because Wilson is doing some of his best work in the rom-com genre. Again, there’s a big buy-in to believe a lackadaisical Berkeley-based documentary film editor would immediately fall for the uptight New York City businesswoman who’s dating his brother. But Wilson sells it through the adoring way Ben gazes at Meredith no matter how socially awkward her antics become. Whatever magical-realist quality Bezucha is aiming for with the Julie/Everett storyline works far better when Ben softly tells Meredith about the dream he had about her: “You were just a little girl in a flannel nightgown, and you were shoveling snow from the walk in front of our house. And I was the snow. I was the snow, and everywhere it landed and everything it covered. And you scooped me up with a big red shovel. You scooped me up.”
The details are so strange and so unlike traditional rom-com banter that you kind of buy that Ben and Meredith have found themselves in some stupor of Midsummer Night’s Dream proportions. And in its best moments, that’s the same spell that The Family Stone casts, too. If Meredith is her worst self because she’s nervous, the Stones are their worst selves because they’re comfortable. And when it comes to the holiday season, most people can probably relate to one of those two experiences. (Critic Anne Cohen has even dubbed The Family Stone “the most Jewish Christmas movie.”) In the end, The Family Stone is as much a familial love story as a traditional romance, which is why its biggest moment of catharsis involves Parker, McAdams, and Keaton sitting on the kitchen floor, covered in raw egg strata, and laughing hysterically at the surreal weekend they’ve had together.
As The Family Stone sees it, the key to making it through the holidays is to try to be our best-worst selves together—to embrace who we are rather than who we think we should be. And there’s a lesson in there about rom-coms too. If we set out looking for the worst in the romantic comedy genre, we can often miss the intentionality that fuels its artistic choices, even when they don’t entirely work. The best moments in The Family Stone are the ones you might not catch if you’re watching while folding laundry or just looking to laugh at its weirdest plot points. It’s a movie that relies on a glance here and a gesture there to convey its true sense of heart. And it was a nice Christmas treat to revisit it with fresh eyes and find so much I’d previously overlooked.
Next time: After a brief holiday break, we return in 2022.
20 Comments
It’s a fine movie, but do we really have to watch it every week? Why don’t we watch Pieces of April instead, for a change? Patricia Clarkson is in it.
But then Big Andy falls in love with Pieces of April so now we watch Pieces of April every week….you kind of made your own bed on that one.
I was just going to say that this is a Christmas movie that acts like a Thanksgiving movie, which in my book makes it good. I tend to hate Christmas movies (often cloying), but THanksgiving movies are often about how difficult family is, with the built-in issue of making and eating a bunch of food, a la Pieces of April and Home for the Holidays.It helps that the Family Stone is basically about my family though, so I might be biased. Complete with terrible easily-mockable sisters-in-law and everything.
I read through that entire column and didn’t see a mention of Sly anywhere.I’ve never watched the film in full, just caught fragments while family members had it on tv. So a lot of my knowledge comes from Josh Barro’s recent thread on it.You would not expect the same director to make the recent “Let Him Go”.
I remember the commercials for this and how obvious it was that Dermont Mulroney was going to fall in love with Claire Danes. It was really weird to introduce a sister character. Maybe it’s too obvious, but it should have been a brother to the SJP character for the lovely Rachel McAdams.
This movie is fucking terrible and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. No.
“It’s the performance that even those who dislike The Family Stone tend to agree is the best thing about the movie.”Really? For me it’s the worst part. Her performance is fine, but her character is awful. There’s nothing endearing about someone who is mean to well-meaning people for absolutely no reason.
Yeah, I think McAdams is great in most things, but her character is the worst. And that’s really saying something in this movie where every character is trying to be the absolute worst.
The most natural romance is between Rachel and Paul Schneider, in a pretty thankless yet sweet role. After everything else that happens in the film, it’s telling that they get the last moment.
I like romantic comedies. I think they’re fun!But Family Stone is just awful. Like one of the worst films I’ve ever seen awful. There is not a single character in that film I’d want to be in an elevator with for 30 seconds let alone spend the holidays with. There is nothing in this film that works for me.
I think there’s a big difference between a movie being admirable- and Family Stone is admirable at points – and a movie being good. And The Family Stone is not good. Portraying boredom in a movie is hard because it’s hard to portray it without being boring. In the same way, TFS is portraying a lot of unlikable people (regardless of motives they’re given for being so later on), and I don’t think it ever transcends that. It’s a really unlikable movie, and I hated spending time with those characters. It’s admirable how it tries to blend tones, but it’s an absolute mess. Often my favorite movies are about unlikable, strange people (King of Comedy being one I recently rewatched), but those are still people you like spending time with. Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding is the absolute WORST at times but the movie still makes sure you relate to her and, mostly because of how good Julia Roberts is, you always do and want to keep on watching her. There was no one in this movie I felt that way about. To sum up: this is probably a much better movie to analyze than to watch.
Isn’t this the same conversation as the importance of liking characters in books determining a book’s quality?
Ish? I think it’s more whether they’re engaging or not – do I want to spend more time with them, regardless of whether they’re good or bad?
Oh that’s totally fair—I think the question is whether they’re engaging. And then whether the Stones and their relationships are engaging…yeah I guess that’s what we’re talking about. : )I think I might have confused “spend time with” as literally spending time with the characters in real life, which you wouldn’t want to do with a lot of “bad” characters and is an annoying position IMO. But spending time in terms of watching them? Right.
I’ll be the outlier. I come from a sarcastic family where the holidays really are kind of like The Family Stone. When I saw it the first time, I could see the weaknesses, but also, it was like going home: the hippie parents living in a charming, snowy Northeast town; mom with a black sense of humor and dad trying to get everyone to get along; the brothers with terrible (thankfully now-ex) wives; the bickering, the warmth, the referencing embarassing pasts … all of it is very relatable to me. We’ve literally had some of those conversations from the movie.
I love today’s column, Caroline. As a long time fan of this movie, I’ve had to deal with the divisiveness basically every year. And I can understand where the criticisms are coming from! Unlikeable characters, cringe train wreck conversations, strange romances . . .But you captured basically every part of this movie that is endearing to me. I think it captures the gentle chaos of a holiday household full with returning family, both falling into and struggling against familiar (familial?) routines. The snowy New England setting is gorgeous. I’m not aware of another film that has this, without it being a farce or heavy drama. This film is sort of in the sweet spot in balancing that out. Ben and Meredith make the movie for me, especially Ben’s snow speech. Everyone who says every character here sucks is just being overdramatic, bc Ben’s easy going character is so likeable- Wilson carries the movie insofar that he finally gets the audience to empathize with Meredith. But Mulroney’s Everett is a key misfire in a central role. I don’t know if the character could’ve been salvaged as written, but definitely not from that performance. His “romance” with Danes’s character is the worst part of the film- unbelievable, creepy, and sentimental. But I can get past them (and skipping the dinner scene- way too much cringe) to enjoy all the other great elements of this film. Including the Jefferson Starship soundtrack.
This is a big swing, because I literally haven’t seen The Family Stone since 2005. I am not a Sarah Jessica Parker fan, I am not a romantic comedy fan, and I am definitely not a Christmas romantic comedy/Christmas movies in general fan. (Except The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, because that shit rocks.)I remember being resentful about The Family Stone and then gradually coming around due to all of the messiness the plot introduces that is significantly different from the easily resolved “messiness” romantic comedy plots usually hinge on. Which is not to say it was an amazing movie—only that it wasn’t as bad as expected.I do think the way The Family Stone violates the especially formulaic/plot-driven nature of romantic comedies probably works against it for most people. But as someone who has consumed a lot of books and a lot of movies, I appreciated it.
One of my favorite holiday movies. It holds up.
I understand to a certain point many of the positive qualities described in this review, but two things I can’t suspend disbelief over make the film unwatchable to me:1. The way Dermot Mulroney basically abandons Sarah Jessica Parker to his family’s mercies. How did these two start dating? Why did he want to marry her? The scene where she’s saying bigoted shit about his brother and he basically tells her to go fuck herself in front of everyone is horrible to watch. It never came up that she’s that ignorant? They’ve never talked about his brother’s life? It’s a lot of mental gymnastics to believe they would ever come close to marrying just so we can watch them both be horrible. Except only she gets to be at a dinner table with ten people who hate her, including her ‘fiance.’ Did she deserve that for the terrible shit she said? Probably, but I don’t want to watch it happen. The film hates her guts for most of its running time, until . . .
2. Sibling swapping. I know people date and even marry their siblings’ exes in real life (I can’t imagine doing that, but that’s me). But watching Mulroney and Parker go from being engaged to each other to dating each others’ siblings in one weekend is laughable, but not in a good way. So Mulroney goes from wanting to marry Parker to basically hating her to being okay with her being his sister-in-law? And has no problem dating her sister and becoming part of her family at the same time? Wilson and Parker are somewhat believable, but that’s because at no point in the movie does Wilson seem like part of his family. He seems like ‘Luke Wilson, romantic comedy lead,’ just sitting in the background of this holiday family movie until he can leave and go star in a romance movie over there. And even then, Parker’s willing to be anywhere near that family again? If I was her and Mulroney’s brother started talking to me, I would have said ‘I’m so sorry’ and just started running until I had a stroke.
It’s not just that both plots fall apart at even the slightest questioning – it’s that the reward for going along with them is you get to watch terrible people be terrible to each other.
There was an overload of cringe, but a good amount of real, believable family dynamics at play in this film. I always felt like the film was “doing too much” but I was never able to articulate why and what exactly so thank you for laying it out!