Christmas with your own family can be difficult, stressful and at times even boring. Why then, anyone would want to spend time with a family, not their own, as awful as the Family Stone is a question the filmmakers should have asked themselves before making this movie. Almost without exception, they are unpleasant, unlikable and completely stuck in their ways and, despite their incredibly left-leaning liberal ways, unwilling to accept anyone who has an opinion that differs from their own.
Sarah Jessica Parker, in her first major endeavor since Sex and the City ended, stars as Meredith, a woman meeting her boyfriend, Everett's, family for the first time by spending Christmas with them. Meredith's personality is as tightly wound as the bun in her hair and the Stone family hates her from the beginning, with their attitude bordering on rudeness from the instant she arrives.
The Stone family is a Hollywood snapshot of what a politically correct liberal family should be. The mom (Diane Keaton) jokes about her kids taking drugs and says how she hoped her kids would be gay, which one of her sons is (and also deaf, adopting a child, and dating a black man just to make the point). When Meredith dares to ask the question, why would a parent hope for their child to be gay, she's practically driven from the dining room table as if she'd just brought up the subject of nipple piercing in a nunnery. There's no room for an opinion that's different from the group's in this house.
Meredith is only accepted by the family after she gets drunk and apparently has an affair with Everett's brother (Luke Wilson). This isn't quite the problem it might seem since by now Everett has fallen in love with Meredith's sister, Claire Danes, who has shown up for moral support. If you think I'm giving anything away, then you obviously haven't seen the previews for this movie where all of this is spelled out in ten-foot high letters.
All of this might still have made for an entertaining movie if any of the characters were remotely likable and/or interesting. They are, however, without a doubt, the dullest, most uninteresting bunch of people ever to be gathered together in one movie. I couldn't care less about any of them. When the terminally dull Luke Wilson is the actor with the most charisma in a movie, you know it's in trouble.
The other problem is that the story can't decide whether it is a comedy or a drama. It wants desperately to be both. All of the best jokes are shown in the previews and so lose most of their impact, while the drama will only work if you actually care about these people, which I definitely did not.
What makes spending Christmas with your family worth it is that they are your family, warts and all. No matter how stressful it becomes, you still share a bond with a group of people that leaves you feeling rewarded when it's all over. There's nothing rewarding about The Family Stone. If I were a member of this family, I'd be changing my name and moving to another state.
