Film Review |
Blue State Blues: The Family Stoneby M. Faust |
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From the moment we meet Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) you can’t help but hate her. She’s doing some last minute shopping in Manhattan with her fiancée Everett (Dermot Mulroney) before leaving for a Connecticut Christmas with his family. Clad in spiked heels and a snug but sexless black power dress that makes her look like some kind of post-apocalyptic insect, with her hair pulled back so tight it’s a wonder she can still bark into her cell phone, Meredith is an egregious stereotype of the Career Woman. She’s on the verge of demanding that her assistant work through the holidays when Everett tugs her away.
Everett appears to be Meredith’s male equivalent, but when they arrive at Chez Stone, we see that he was cut from different cloth. Soft fabrics and earth tones abound, and you can all but smell the scent of fresh pies and patchouli.
At this point we recognize a formula. We adjust our expectations of The Family Stone to 90 minutes or so of personality clash humor in which Meredith is eventually mellowed and softened by her new family, who teach her that there are more important things in life than climbing the corporate ladder in uncomfortable footwear. It’s a formula with a fine pedigree, after all, one that made for a lot of classic screwball comedies—My Man Godfrey, for instance, or Holiday, or Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You.
But those films won us over by letting us discover that their bohemian characters were finer people both in spite of and because of their eccentricities. The Family Stone, on the other hand—both the characters and the film that bears their name—are so insufferably smug that you stumble through the movie longing for someone to root for.
Certainly not younger sister Amy (Rachel McAdams), who formed a bad opinion of Meredith on a visit to NYC and is determined that the rest of the family not give her a chance. Nor Diane Keaton as mother Sybil (can that name possibly have been chosen at random?), whose idea of light conversation is saying that she wishes all of her children had been born gay or that a friend of her daughter is “the guy who popped her cherry.” She would probably call such comments “mischievous.” To us, they’re simply rude.
Here’s when I knew this film was in real trouble. The Stones’ youngest son, Thad (Ty Giordono) is deaf. And he’s gay. And he has a black lover. At the very least, this is script overkill in trying to show us what bastions of openness the Stones are. But writer-director Thomas Bezucha films all of the scenes involving Thad with such naked self-congratulation that you start to resent the kid. Rush Limbaugh could get a week’s worth of shows out of this movie’s liberal pieties.
At the same time, Bezucha so stacks the deck against Meredith that, irritating as she is, you can’t help but feel sorry for her. At least she’s making an effort, misguided as it may be, which is more than the rest of these people are doing.
The Family Stone takes a turn for the dramatic with a revelation of illness. When it came, I hoped that it would lead to some explanation of why these characters behave so badly. It doesn’t—it’s merely another ham-fisted attempt at emotional manipulation by the filmmaker (whose previous experience was a window designer for Ralph Lauren).
Having lurched into this direction, Bezucha neglects to adjust his tone when he switches Meredith and Everett off with his brother (Luke Wilson, playing the same laid-back guy he always plays) and her sister (Clair Danes), leading to a situation that could only work in a broad comedy, not a film with any pretension to realism. I suspect that Bezucha’s agent probably sold this script by calling it a “tart comedy.” But there’s a thin line between tart and sour.
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