By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
In Sickness and In Sickness: Reading About 'The Family Stone'
Ouch. My arch-nemesis California has taken cosmic retribution on me since I arrived early yesterday morning, all but crashing my laptop and smacking me down with a kind of flu-symptom whiplash that I would not wish on… well, actually, I can think of a few people. This is me, loving the holidays.
Speaking of the holidays, my time spent withering in the analog world allowed me a little bit of airport-catching up with the print folks at The New York Observer, New York Press and Village Voice, all of whom featured some wildly divergent digressions on Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone. Nothing about viewing the film had really inspired any deep aesthetic reflections in me; nevertheless, it was nice to see critics like Dennis Lim and Armond White care enough to unlock the truths undergirding Bezucha’s story about a dysfunctional liberal family that welcomes a son’s priggish fiancee (Sarah Jessica Parker) into their home for Christmas.
For his part, the Voice’s Lim has a radical new subgenre down to a science. Literally:
1. Include an outsider. The most useful figure in the (Holiday Family Reunion Movie), the interloper serves either as counterpoint to the functionally dysfunctional family or as the tight-knit brood’s common object of ridicule. … Will the loosey-goosey Stones thaw out the WASP icicle? Will she in turn, once she literally lets her hair down, teach them not to be so judgmental? People who have never seen movies will be on the edge of their seats.
2. Add minorities. The HFRM is a bourgeois white preserve, but a sprinkling of Others conjures the illusion of social relevance. … In (Bezucha’s) all-of-the-above scripting masterstroke, the youngest son is (a) deaf, (b) gay, and (c) has a black boyfriend. The movie lavishes praise on the enlightened Stones for not treating these attributes like handicaps. Or maybe, since these are the two most boring, neutered homosexuals in film history, it’s just that no one notices them (Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas in Philadelphia look like Genet sodomites by comparison).
3. Give Mom cancer. Other illnesses with other family members work too, but this combo has a foolproof classicism. … (F)or Mom, you’ll need someone with presence: Patricia Clarkson in (Pieces of) April or, better still, Diane Keaton in Stone, looking like a Sontagian lioness and acting batshit. Don’t play the terminal card before the second half, though. This gives you enough time to set her up as eccentric, unstable, even mean. The crazier the better—all will be weepily forgiven in due course.
Yikes! Is Lim oversimplifying? Let us ask Armond White, who thankfully was able to squeeze resonant 17th century French drama and a swipe at his pet cinematic peeve into 1,174 words of his own:
Before romantic slapstick chaos leaves the family bruised, exhausted yet slowly healing, Bezucha achieves moments of desperate revelation more beautiful than you expect. … Meredith finally protests her mistreatment and her outcry is so unabashed it galvanizes the movie. Meredith’s plea pushes the film’s sit-com premise to the furthest edge. Parker’s wail contains the bitterest dregs of sorrow. And in this context, it has the force of Moliere.
Bezucha and Parker accomplish what Sex in the City never did; they glimpse the everyday tragedy of people caught up in social and family competition. And they make you feel it. This intelligently sentimental Christmas movie manages the miracle of never being cynical.
I guarantee you Fox is printing up new posters with the blurb, ” ‘A miracle… the force of Moliere’–Armond White, New York Press” as we speak. Anyway, none of this would have really mattered that much to me had I not stumbled on Erin Coe’s Family Stone premiere report in this week’s Observer–an oddly reverent-yet-revolted series of interviews that meets Lim’s cynicism and White’s miracle (or at least the miracle of celebrity) halfway:
Saunter along with us as The Family Stone cast and friends share their own Christmas-time tales of awkward moments, alcohol-induced comas and horrible gifts. Hooray! …
After the screening, Luke Wilson, in a pinstripe suit and brown sneakers, looked like he could use a nice, long nap himself. His family and friends were in town to go to the screening and after-party at the Plaza Athénée, along with Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld and Paul Giamatti. He seemed just a bit stressed!
“If you knew me, you’d find out how wound up I am,” Mr. Wilson said. “Like right now, I’m exhausted, but I’m wound tight. I’m uptight. I got a bunch of people here. I’m trying to get them all to the party.” O.K.!
And so on and so forth! If only I could have sent along a question or two with Coe, because someone really needs to ask Bezucha exactly what screenwriting software converts one’s Holiday Family Reunion Film to Moliere. I think she would have had the nerve, and those exclamation points would have presented just enough irony to get away with it in the end. Alas, there is always next Christmas, I suppose–assuming I survive California.
