An absolute freakin' nightmare: imagine spending the holidays with Diane Keaton in full-smirk, full-chuffing, shit-eating laughter mode, then magnify that with a screenplay by hyphenate and former fashion executive Thomas Bezucha that never misses an opportunity to excrete a little dollop of quirk where silence would have spoken volumes. The Family Stone is an intensely middlebrow bath, dipped in warm sentiments and institutionalized ugliness--one half slapstick fish-out-of-water, one half chestnut-lit holiday perennial-hopeful. (The marriage works about as well as it does in other pieces of Yuletide garbage like Christmas with the Kranks and Home Alone.) Therein, eldest Stone boy Everett (professional piece of wood Dermot Mulroney) is home for the holidays (it's not as good, obviously, as Jodie Foster's film of the same name but it's cut from the same cloth) to introduce his girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to his quirky tribe. Chief antagonist for the first hour is mousy (yeah, right) Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has an NPR duffel bag in a brief introductory shot, thus establishing her character as much as it's ever going to be established. She doesn't like Meredith because I don't know why but proceeds to brand her a racist and a boor when it seems that, mostly, Meredith is intensely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Maybe she has social anxiety disorder, or the more common stick-up-her-ass-ism. That's how appropriately-named evil mother Sybil (Diane Keaton) diagnoses her, except she calls Meredith a monkey and replaces the ass-stick with a silver spoon.

Ergo there's a little bit of classism going on here, except that beloved Everett does exactly the same thing Meredith does and wears a shirt and tie to play charades, so...physician, heal thyself, yes? Another sister (Elizabeth Reaser), older and pregnant, generally hangs out in the background until she's called on to sit by herself and watch Meet Me in St. Louis (ah, treacle-within-a-treacle, how po-mo), which, because it might jerk a tear and not because it has anything to do with anything else in the picture, Bezucha lingers on for ages. But the worst is little brother Thad (Tyrone Giordano), whose status as a deaf homosexual dating a black man (Brian White) would be fine as far as it goes if it weren't for a dinner table scene where the already unjustly-demonized Meredith is laid waste as she suggests that gay people have more hurdles to overcome than straight folk. By making being gay a point of honour or derision, you succeed only in transforming your picture into a painful message piece and an opportunity to use your characters as righteous mouthpieces for your own knee-jerk liberal politics. Sybil gets the virtuous vituperation this time around, in addition to the misty-eyed affirmation for a peculiarly fragile Thad, who, with all of these screenwriting workshop strikes against him, would surely have thicker skin by now. Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly incomprehensible why Everett would ever love such a monster (Sybil, Meredith, Amy... take your pick).

The Family Stone is awful, reprehensible stuff. As soon as Meredith's sister (Home for the Holidays' own Claire Danes, luminous) arrives to lend moral support, you know just by the lighting that Everett's going to end up proposing to her instead--and as soon as you realize that, you know that for it to be okay (because the film is as interested in resolving everything as a hysterical brood-mare), The Family Stone will pair off Meredith with Everett's stoner brother Ben (Luke Wilson). Quirky! Goofy! Taken with a Christmas present that's a framed vintage photo of Keaton's character, pregnant and with breasts (did I mention that Sybil's dying? Did I need to?), it's enough to make you vomit, but you don't quite because there are a couple moments of grace, both of them involving Stone family patriarch Kelly (a superb Craig T. Nelson). Nelson turns in what is arguably the only interpretation of this rancid text that reads as warm and human; between a scene where Kelly and Ben have lunch on bleachers in the middle of a snowstorm and another in which he quietly anchors an extraordinarily badly-handled revelation sequence with red-rimmed eyes and a look of sad desperation, you'll wish the picture were about him instead of a collection of jolly dysfunction clichés, a screed on homosexuality, and the kind of "insight" into family and legacy that bean counters have programmed into the one part of the year people are most likely to forgive this breed of feckless heartfelt pap.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

1.86:1 DVD capture: The Family Stone

Fox presents The Family Stone on DVD in competing widescreen and fullscreen editions; we received the former for review. The 1.86:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer is mediocre at best, beset as it is by poor shadow detail and thick saturation. Though the film has been colour-timed into oblivion to make everyone appear trapped in amber (check out the gag reel and deleted scenes to see how much better it all looked straight from the lab), I still think the telecine operators could've squeezed a little more blood from this Stone. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio meanwhile renders a Standard Comedy Mix with aplomb. Two yak-tracks accompany the film on DVD, the first pairing actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Dermot Mulroney, the second reuniting writer-director Thomas Bezucha with producer Michael London, editor Jeffrey Ford, and production designer Jane Ann Stewart. The Parker/Mulroney yakker is scorchingly banal ("That's Diane Keaton, ladies and gentlemen," "Yeah, right on"), while the production commentary is chatty--well, Bezucha and Ford are chatty--but generally unenlightening, especially with the remaining extras consolidating this love-in's most pertinent points.

In "Fox Movie Channel Presents: Casting Sessions" (8 mins.), London reveals that The Family Stone was almost made twice before outside the studio system. We learn that when Fox saw how much name-brand talent had committed to the project they insisted on footing the bill, and Diane Keaton, in junket footage, admits that she loathed having to learn sign language for the film. Never satisfactorily addressed is the source of Bezucha's burning desire to see this project to the screen; because of that, the multiple declarations of solidarity from cast and crew here and in "Fox Movie Channel Presents: World Premiere" (6 mins.) mostly come off as inexplicable. As an aside, does it say something about me or The Family Stone that I was surprised to discover Tyrone Giordano is hearing-impaired in real-life? I guess I figured no deaf person with an ounce of self-respect would agree to play the part of Thad. Claire Danes' legs and an incorrigible Luke Wilson steal the limelight in an "October 8, 2005: Q&A with Cast at the Screen Actors' Guild Theater" (8 mins.), so much so that it really hammers home how squandered both assets are by The Family Stone proper. Rounding out the platter, two teasers and one theatrical trailer for The Family Stone, an 18-minute "Behind the Scenes" featurette, a 6-minute gag reel (gag is right), and six deleted scenes with optional commentary from Bezucha and Ford are to a one without any nutritional value whatsoever. (I can't speak for the text-based recipe for "Meredith's Strata.") Kudos to Fox for honouring Giordano's character by captioning every single supplement, right down to the additional previews for Confetti, Little Manhattan, and Just My Luck.-Bill Chambers

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