So the other night my girlfriend insisted we watch The Family Stone because it was a Christmas movie and she remembered liking it. Needless to say by the end of the movie we were both very pissed off by it.
To sum things up, Sarah Jessica Parker is a conservative businesswoman who goes home with her boyfriend Dermot Mulroney to his very liberal family’s home in Connecticut. Sounds like a bad mix, right? Having grown up in a somewhat conservative household in a liberal part of the world (I identify as left of center these days) I understand as that political differences make for some misunderstandings as well as anybody. The problem is that Sarah Jessica Parker is immediately depicted as completely unlikeable. She talks too much, she forgets to refill the coffee pot that must always remain filled at Diane Keaton’s request, she points to the black guy while playing charades in her attempt to act out the title of the 1966 François Truffaut film The Bride Wore Black (a very obscure reference, even for a film nerd like myself). There’s no reason to believe her boyfriend would ever go out with the woman because the film never gives us an opportunity to see them in action.
It doesn’t help that the entire family is aggressively hostile to her from the get go. This ostensibly perfect, progressive family who upholds the bastions of tolerance and acceptance go out of their way to treat her badly. Not to mention that one of the sons is a gay deaf guy with a black boyfriend (representation!) who are nothing more than props to show how accepting this family is. They don’t have personalities, they don’t have goals or motivations, and they don’t even kiss. In one scene Diane Keaton says she always wanted a gay son “because she wanted him to be their little boy forever.” What a strange thing to say. SJP makes some extremely ham-fisted comment about not wanting a child to be gay because of the discrimination it would receive. Weird thing to say, but not entirely untrue. Everyone shouts at her until she drunkenly attempts to drive away into the middle of the night, crashing the car into two trees and NO ONE GOES OUTSIDE to see if she’s okay. Except for Luke Wilson who has a thing for her. Then after a night of drinking at the bar she wakes up naked in his bed and he leads her to believe they slept together even though they didn’t. What?
This film is frustrating on multiple levels. It’s an incredibly mean-spirited film, it has an incredible cast that is wasted on a mediocre-at-best script, and the politics are extremely misguided and insulting. I’m not convinced this director has ever met a real person in his life, much less ones with differing political beliefs. Am I missing something here?
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/k3ioht/the_family_stone_is_a_dreadful_holiday_movie_with/
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