Product Description

Sarah Jessica Parker, Diane Keaton, and Rachel McAdams lead an all-star cast in The Family Stone. Join the eccentric Stone family for a holiday gathering filled with unexpected surprises. Before the festivities are over, love affairs will unravel, new ones will form, outrageous secrets will be revealed and the family will come together like never before.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #746 in DVD
• Brand: Family
• Released on: 2006-05-02
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .15 pounds
• Running time: 103 minutes

Amazon.com
For anyone who views holiday gatherings with equal parts joy and dread, The Family Stone offers plenty of comedy to identify with. Writer-director Thomas Bezucha's slapstick premise begins when Everett (Dermot Mulroney) brings his fiancé Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) home to meet his family for Christmas. It's an instant disaster when parents Sybil (Diane Keaton) and Kelly (Craig T. Nelson) agree with their gay, deaf son Thad (Ty Giordano, who is actually hearing impaired), pot-smoking son Ben (Luke Wilson) and daughters Amy (Rachel McAdams) and Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) that Meredith is way too uptight to be welcomed into their family. Meredith recruits her sister Julie (Claire Danes) to help her thaw the Stone family cold front, and after building a solid emotional foundation for his holiday comedy, Bezucha starts to stack the deck with plot developments that, while heartwarming, border on the absurd. You either go with the movie's flow or you don't, and with this appealing cast (featuring some really nice work by Keaton, Nelson, Parker and Danes) it's easy to forgive Bezucha's unlikely blend of yuletide cheer, petty animosities, and romantic tables turned in the blink of an eye. Toss in a case of terminal illness and you've got a sad-happy tearjerker that works in spite of itself. If you don't recognize at least part of your own holiday clan in The Family Stone, you probably haven't been paying attention. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Excellent and Real!
OK, this film was a bit misleading in its promotion. This film is NOT a comedy. It has comedic elements but the film is a drama. The film is perfect in its execution. It is far from the cheesy Christmas films of old. It harkens back to films like "Home for the Holidays" with Holly Hunter (a classic in its own right for both Hunter and Robert Downey Jr's performances). The familial angst, the liberal meeting the conservative, the desire for love, family protecting family, it's all here. Sarah Jessica Parker shines in a very different role for her. You feel her painful shyness at dinner when she is so misunderstood in her intentions that she ends up in the car crying.

Not all aspects of the film are to be applauded but the underlying story of the "family stone" which could be the ring requested from the matriarch of the family, the last name of the family of course or the matriarch herself are amazing. Very touching moment at the end, if a bit unrealistic, where they all focus on the picture given as a gift of a pregnant Diane Keaton.

Rachel McAdams is also a shining part of this truly ensemble performance. She plays the little sister with tenacity and twisted pleasure but hides a softer side under sarcasm. She is the perfect foil to Sarah Jessica Parker and I love the humor, heart and love shown throughout this wonderful film.

Better than the average genre entry
This sort of movie has been done to death, one would think - look at names that are listed in preceding reviews - and while Family Stone fails to provide an earthshattering new insight into the set piece, I think it's a cut above average.

For one thing, the family itself is only slightly disfunctional in its relationships among one another, a distinct relief. For example, the gay son is loved and accepted, as is his partner. There are hints that the mother may have been too clinging but, all in all, the now-adult children of Mr. and Mrs. Stone, magnificently portrayed by Diane Keaton, seem to be handling their lives with aplomb and success.

The Family Stone rolls out its disfunction when a newcomer attempts to join the family. The catalyst for this family gathering is Christmas, probably the worst of holidays for families in general because Chritmas is also the annual festival of dashed expectations, at first material and quickly psychological. A scene late in the movie, when Parker's character distributes presents, demonstrates this motif beautifully.

Our first hint that things will go badly is a scene where some members of the family mock the inniment-fiancee of the eldest son before she has even arrived with the son for a first-time visit. Then you notice that the husband of the only other child (of five) who is married has delayed his arrival until Christmas Day. Hmmmm...what does he know?

And badly things do go, usually in an over-the-top and frantic way saved only by the extraordinary acting skill and comfortable (or appropriately uncomfortable) ensemble work of the excellent cast (besides Keaton, there's Craig T. Nelson, Dermot Mulroney, Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and Sarah Jessica Parker). These people take nastiness to new heights and I believe if all of us hadn't been through something similar at some point in our lives we'd insist it was unrealistic. C'mon...think a little harder, about what happened when Aunt Sally got tipsy last Thanksgiving and decided to tell your Dad what it was like being the younger, "dumber" one, all those years ago?

Parker also is particularly good, portraying a buttoned-down (but fashionable) Wall-Street yuppie, at least 150-degrees different from her flighty role and Sex and the City.

I enjoyed Family Stone more than I expected to, and it made me think about how families work (and don't work), too. A few of the plot endings at the end really do push credibility too far, but everything is not wrapped up in a ball of cotton candy, just like real life.

a lump of Christmas coal
*spoilers*

Despite the presence of actors no less stellar than Diane Keaton, Craig T. Nelson, Rachel McAdams, Clair Danes, Dermot Mulroney, Sarah Jessica Parker and Luke Wilson, I never believed for a moment that the characters in "The Family Stone" were ever related to one another in any way whatsoever. Both they and the story they are involved in feel like the products of a Screenwriting 101 workshop, with all the realism and believability one would expect from such an enterprise.

Keaton and Nelson are Sybil and Everett Stone, the parents of five grown children who have all gathered to celebrate one final Christmas together in the parents' idyllic Connecticut home before Sybil passes away from cancer. Each of the siblings has an "idiosyncrasy" stamped onto his or her persona with all the subtlety of a cattle brand. Everett (Mulroney), the stuffed-shirt perfectionist, has brought a woman home with him to meet the family - a rigid, equally uptight woman from The City named Meredith (Parker). The family takes an immediate disliking to her and wastes no time in trying to sabotage her chances with their darling son/brother - though why they don't see that Everett and Meredith are actually perfectly suited for one another is just one of the many head-scratching implausibilities that make up this script. Most of the film is spent with Meredith trying desperately to ingratiate herself with the nasty brood while the family worries about the impending loss of their wife and mother, and several of the children participate in a roundelay of romantic musical chairs more appropriate to a bunch of prepubescent adolescents than supposed adults in their twenties and thirties.

As a family, the Stones are not so much dysfunctional as they are simply annoying. Insufferably smug, petty and self-righteous, the Stones are models of tolerance only when it comes to their own in-group apparently - being highly supportive of their deaf gay son/brother and his black partner, for instance - but they are far less inclined to extend that same courtesy to those unfortunate enough to be trapped outside the family circle. Frankly, after their nauseating mistreatment of Meredith, I couldn't figure out why she didn't just tell them all to go to hell, hightail it on out of there, and go spend Christmas with people who might actually like her and treat her like a genuine human being.

To add insult to injury, the movie exploits the issue of terminal illness in an effort to lend unearned weight to what is otherwise a hopelessly contrived, unflaggingly trivial and utterly unconvincing family drama. The script hits its low point in a ridiculous, badly staged slapstick scene involving various family members slipping and sliding across the linoleum after the family's holiday meal somehow lands on the kitchen floor (don`t even ask). Not even a flavorful, touching coda can wipe away the bitter taste of much of what occurs earlier on in the film.

For a much better variation on this theme of an outsider trying to batter her way into an exclusive family circle, check out the far superior "Junebug" and skip this lump of Christmas coal altogether.