"The Family Stone"

"The Family Stone" is a disappointing movie. Where it aims for humor, it ends up painful and awkward. When it tries to twist, it turns predictable. While it wants to portray depth and layers, it dishes up shallow, cliche characters.

The plot centers around a Stone Christmas celebration, to which one of the Stone sons brings his girlfriend, Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker). She and the Stones immediately clash, and things only get worse when Everett (Dermont Mulroney) tells his parents that he plans to propose to Meredith on Christmas morning. The audience is supposed to believe that the cause is the conflict is because Meredith is conservative and uptight, and that Everett's family is just relaxed, quirky and liberal. Not so.

Meredith gets drunk at a bar, smokes pot, and later sleeps with Everett's brother -- what's uptight or conservative about any of these things? Her interactions with the Stones are awkward not because she is uptight, but because she is usually polite, uncomfortable, nervous, and doesn't get the family's humor. The Stones, though they are liberal (and might be quirky -- none of them are ever developed well-enough to show this), are also ridiculously rude, unkind, ungrateful, and unwelcoming. So much so that it's hard to believe these adults behave this way -- and it's hard to feel for them.

It's hard to feel for most of the characters. None of them have any depth: they rely on stereotypes, misconceptions, and cliches. All the audience knows about Everett is that he's successful and he likes Meredith; all the audience knows about Ben (Luke Wilson: another Stone, another love interest), is that he loves his mom, he thinks Meredith is hot, and he likes to relax and smoke pot.

Even Meredith: all the audience knows about her is that she works hard, is fashionable, successful, polite, nervous, and rude to gays. This last characteristic makes her less endearing to the audience at a time when she seems the most hackneyed -- and needs our empathy the most. "I'm not a racist bigot," she says. "I know that's what you see, but I'm not a racist bigot." However, there's no evidence beyond her own word that proves she is not. Thus, the audience's only conclusion is that she is, in fact, a racist bigot. This -- after the plot gives away all the secrets and Meredith relaxes and lets her hair down by drinking at a bar and actually letting her hair down. Very winning, very original. And this is before all the usual flip-flopping-partner-swapping starts.