On falling in love with The Family Stone

All that attention to detail pays off in the second act reveal that Sybil’s breast cancer has returned and this will likely be her last Christmas with the family. It’s a swerve towards heavier material that throws a lot of viewers off, particularly since the film was marketed as more of an out-and-out comedy. But there’s something appreciably bold about Bezucha’s attempt to pioneer the “tragicomic Christmas screwball romance” genre. For all the film’s broader physical comedy, Bezucha ensures that each of the five Stone siblings get a meaningful moment with their mom, too, including Sybil’s showier speeches to Everett and Thad, and the small moment when Susannah quietly cuddles up to her mom while she’s napping. Maybe most moving of all is the scene where Meredith gifts the family with an old photo of a pregnant Sybil, who looks up at Amy to say, simply, “That’s you and me, kid. You and me.”

Sybil’s illness also helps explain why the Stone family are desperate for someone to aim all their pent-up frustration and anger at, too. There’s a through line of trauma and grief here that becomes clearer with rewatches. Where the movie stumbles a bit, however, is in trying to balance that heavier core with its lighter rom-com moments. The thing that always trips me up is the addition of Meredith’s little sister, Julie (Claire Danes), who gets called in as emotional support during Meredith’s moment of crisis. Though you’d think the film would use Julie to humanize Meredith and offer a different family dynamic for comparison, the Morton sister relationship actually winds up feeling almost incidental. Instead, Julie’s arrival is Bezucha’s convoluted way of giving Everett a new love interest as Meredith starts falling for Ben.

The trouble is, the Everett/Julie romance hinges on the sort of magic, love-at-first sight connection that would be a tricky sell for any romantic comedy, let alone one that’s also kind of trying to be a grounded ensemble drama and occasional cringe-comedy. Whatever “opposites attract” thing Bezucha is going for doesn’t work with Julie and Everett, mostly because they both seem too flighty and noncommittal to be a functioning couple. And getting the audience to root for their romance is a big ask considering he starts the movie ready to get engaged to her sister and she doesn’t even enter the story until over a third of the way through.

The Meredith/Ben stuff is better, if only because Wilson is doing some of his best work in the rom-com genre. Again, there’s a big buy-in to believe a lackadaisical Berkeley-based documentary film editor would immediately fall for the uptight New York City businesswoman who’s dating his brother. But Wilson sells it through the adoring way Ben gazes at Meredith no matter how socially awkward her antics become. Whatever magical-realist quality Bezucha is aiming for with the Julie/Everett storyline works far better when Ben softly tells Meredith about the dream he had about her: “You were just a little girl in a flannel nightgown, and you were shoveling snow from the walk in front of our house. And I was the snow. I was the snow, and everywhere it landed and everything it covered. And you scooped me up with a big red shovel. You scooped me up.”

The details are so strange and so unlike traditional rom-com banter that you kind of buy that Ben and Meredith have found themselves in some stupor of Midsummer Night’s Dream proportions. And in its best moments, that’s the same spell that The Family Stone casts, too. If Meredith is her worst self because she’s nervous, the Stones are their worst selves because they’re comfortable. And when it comes to the holiday season, most people can probably relate to one of those two experiences. (Critic Anne Cohen has even dubbed The Family Stone “the most Jewish Christmas movie.”) In the end, The Family Stone is as much a familial love story as a traditional romance, which is why its biggest moment of catharsis involves Parker, McAdams, and Keaton sitting on the kitchen floor, covered in raw egg strata, and laughing hysterically at the surreal weekend they’ve had together.

As The Family Stone sees it, the key to making it through the holidays is to try to be our best-worst selves together—to embrace who we are rather than who we think we should be. And there’s a lesson in there about rom-coms too. If we set out looking for the worst in the romantic comedy genre, we can often miss the intentionality that fuels its artistic choices, even when they don’t entirely work. The best moments in The Family Stone are the ones you might not catch if you’re watching while folding laundry or just looking to laugh at its weirdest plot points. It’s a movie that relies on a glance here and a gesture there to convey its true sense of heart. And it was a nice Christmas treat to revisit it with fresh eyes and find so much I’d previously overlooked.

Next time: After a brief holiday break, we return in 2022.