Rating:

This film is easily the best Christmas movie to have come out of Hollywood in the past ten years.

What makes it so good? Well, that’s a fair question to ask. There’s a lot of things that make a movie good. The way it’s shot, the pacing of the plot, the acting, the writing, originality–all sorts of things. This film certainly does them competently. Probably the writing, is the most obvious strong point.

But what makes this movie truly great is the fact that it’s not about what you think it’s about. It head-fakes you with a romantic comedy veneer, and then breaks right, creating the illusion of a family-centered comedy, before finally stepping back and revealing itself as a pitch-perfect seasonal drama.

It’s funny and it’s warm and it’s about family… but mainly it’s about what it’s like to be wrong, and how easy it is to decide to be right.

We open on Everett Stone and his girlfriend Meredith (Dermot Mulroney and Sarah Jessica Parker), and boy do they look like a couple of stiffs. Grey business suits, perfectly parted hair, lots of serious talk as they drive down the road toward his family’s woodsy New England home. They’re going to spend a few days with them, including Christmas. And man, if the family is anything like these two, it’s going to be one boring ass movie about stock reports and business mergers.

Luckily for us, we soon find that Everett’s family is pretty motherfucking great. They’re friendly and easygoing and they chase each other around and crack jokes and lift each other up in the air when they hug. And Everett’s brother (Luke Wilson) is the laid back family layabout, who isn’t ashamed of sneaking off with their dad (Craig T. Nelson!) to smoke a little pot and have a serious talk in the snow.

There’s like six other family members but you don’t need to hear about them. Suffice to say that they’re all full of love and Christmas cheer. And for some reason, it’s not the least bit revolting. Probably because the clash between the couple’s and the family’s personalities makes for such great comedy.

As an example of the clash, the ridiculously uptight Meredith refuses to sleep in the same bed as her boyfriend while they’re in his mother’s home. When Everett tells this to his mother (Diane Keaton), her gleefully glib response is simply, “Why not, don’t you guys screw?”

Now that’s the kind of dialog I can really get behind.

Diane Keaton carries the whole film on her capable shoulders. The rest of the cast is competent, but not excellent. She is the exception, and you notice it immediately.

I also really love the way the character of Meredith is written–probably because I know a few people exactly like her in my life: uptight, unsure of herself, eager to deny herself things that she easily deserves.

So anyway there’s this big rift between her and the family. They feel that she’s changed Everett, the family’s oldest and most admired son. And what’s more, Everett wants to ask her to marry him, and everyone strongly objects. That’s what “The Family Stone” is all about–he wants his mother to give him her engagement ring, a family heirloom, so he can use it to propose to his insane girlfriend. She refuses.

Anyway, anyone can see that the two don’t belong together. Try as he might to mimic her exact lifestyle, with his suit and tie and uptight attitude, it’s hard to imagine such a man emerging from this free spirited family of fun-loving goofs.

Maybe it’s a testament to the film’s delicately woven plot that I can’t seem to describe it to you in 500 words. I haven’t even gotten to the part where Meredith calls in her sister for moral support, which of course blows up in her face because her sister (Claire Danes) is far more like the family than she is.

So anyway Everett is immediately smitten with the sister, who balances his straight man act well, and Meridith falls for Everett’s easygoing pothead of a brother (Luke Wilson), who’s an excellent counterpoint to her conservative lifestyle.

In the end, everyone is a better person for it, and it was the love of the family that brought it out, etc etc. Let me just say that you have to see it to believe it, because I know reading through this plot summary makes it sound like a simple love story, when really it’s so much more.

There is a chance, however, that you may be off put by the roller-coaster like experience of the film’s theme. A plotline in the story, which I will not give away, is very serious, and very dramatic. It can be hard to shift gears from the lightness and comedy of the film to the more dramatic themes when they come up. But trust me, it’s this aspect of the film which makes it much more than a love story or a comedy or a dramedy. It’s this aspect that makes you feel the film, right in your gut, all the way through, and particularly at the end. It’s this that makes you love it.

And I do. I love that it’s about finding yourself, not finding love. I love that it’s about realizing when you’re an idiot, and then fixing it.

And believe me when I tell you, more people need to see movies that remind you of that–because now and again, we all need to find ourselves. And sometimes, people can be idiots their entire lives. But they can fix it.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• A Christmas Story
• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
• Give The Simpsons Its Due
• Scrooged
• Cartoon Wars