Set In Stone
The Family Stone is the holidays-with-the-dysfunctional-family film of 2005. It seems as if there is at least one every year. Stone tells the story of Everett Stone (hunky Dermot Mulroney) and the fiancée he brings to his family at Christmas time. Sarah Jessica Parker plays Meredith Morton, the fiancée, with corn-cob-up-her-butt intensity. As soon as the family meets her they don’t like her and it doesn’t help that Meredith says and does all the wrong things. The matriarch of the family is Sybil Stone, played by none other than Diane Keaton. The people in this family are horrible and I wouldn’t want to talk to them on the street, much less spend Christmas with them. The film is so cliché that it’s almost pathetic. No dysfunctional family film would be complete without an illness and the death of a family member. Thankfully we are spared the funeral at the end. There’s even a gay son who’s deaf and has an African American spouse. And it’s very predictable; it doesn’t break any new ground. The only thing that sets this movie apart from the other dysfunctional-family-at-the-holidays movies is the cast. There are a couple of performances that stand out. Luke Wilson plays the role of unkempt, chilled out stoner (is that redundant?) Ben Stone. He keeps the performance just interesting enough to keep it from becoming trite. And Rachel McAdams (the love interest from the film The Notebook) plays Amy Stone, the mean spirited sister. She takes the character right to the edge of being unredeemable but never actually crosses the line. The film isn’t all bad, there are some truly good moments but no new ground is broken. The switcheroo of the couples can be seen a mile away and everyone lives happily ever after, well, almost everyone. I kind of wish I had counted the number of times Parker’s character says “I’m sorry” in the film, it felt like a running joke. If you like the predictably entertaining but not laugh out loud funny type of movie then this is the one for you.