Oh, Joy

One cannot in good conscience describe the countless strands of plot and strains of characters skittering through The Family Stone without knowing that any such description merits at least a snicker, if not bellowing guffaws. The movie is too overstuffed by half with pointless people and plot lines that dangle like warning signs, begging you to stay away. And yet as ridiculous, mawkish and schizophrenic as The Family Stone is, it’s also surprisingly endearing, a movie about people who behave the way real folks do. In short, the movie works in spite of itself.

One after another, characters pile into the snow-covered Stone household like refugees, until it’s filled with every conceivable archetype known in hackdom. There is gay and deaf son Thad (Tyrone Giordano), who brings home for the holidays his longtime African-American partner, Patrick (Brian White), whom the family adores. There is doper son Ben (Luke Wilson), who smokes bowls with the old man (Craig T. Nelson) in Christmas Eve snowdrifts. There is grungy, troublesome daughter Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has a sneer smeared across her face.

There is pregnant daughter Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser), whose husband is absent despite promises of arriving Christmas morning. (The suggestion here is that Susannah is suffering marital woes, which is a distracting, ultimately fruitless threat.) And then there is eldest son Everett (Dermot Mulroney), a buttoned-up boy who brings with him an uptight girlfriend, Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker), who’s so bereft of spunk and warmth that the family, of course, loathes her — save for Ben, who spies through his stoner’s haze Meredith’s furled “freak flag.” And hovering over them all is the good mother, Sybil Stone (Diane Keaton), one of those beloved, tragic figures without whom home-for-the-holidays movies wouldn’t be the same.

Writer-director Thomas Bezucha, a former Ralph Lauren exec, works overtime like an elf at the assembly line on December 23, and he seems accidentally to have hit upon a novel concept: a melodrama played for laughs. And its laughs are genuine. Wilson, for instance, hasn’t been this affable and accessible since his debut in Bottle Rocket; his performance is casual and effortless, as though he dropped in for a day and stayed for the month. McAdams, too, is delightful.

The Family Stone is sweet and sincere, and Bezucha treats his characters not like the cardboard cutouts they appear to be but like, well, family. The Stones dislike Meredith not just because she’s sour and anxious but because she isn’t a member of their team. Meredith’s fractious relationship with the family feels dead-on; she has every right to hate people who treat her so callously.

Perhaps it’s the holiday season that engenders this inexplicable feeling of goodwill; perhaps by June, The Family Stone will have lost all its contagious charm. Till then, at least, it’s the perfect end-of-the-year trifle, a warm, earnest little gift that, at the very least, doesn’t know when to stop giving. — Wilonsky