B The Family Stone
Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Sarah Jessica Parker, Luke Wilson
You’ve seen this before: guy brings his girlfriend home to meet the family at Christmas. They don’t like her. June Bug did the same story recently. The Christmas theme, with its built-in saccharine sweetness and subterranean family tensions, lets the writer off the hook for doing anything creative. Diane Keaton as the matriarch does some of the best acting of her career. Rachel McAdams has a silly petulant character, but she plays it extremely well. (She appears as a blonde in the DVD extras and that is so wrong for her). Luke Wilson looks and sounds eerily like his brother Owen, but he actually does some subtle and serious acting here. The sets are overdone, too cute and funky. The movie hinges on the contrivance that for the first half , Sarah Jessica Parker, the hated fiancé, is a two-dimensional caricature that justifies the Stone family’s dislike of her (sort of). Finally she gets drunk and (literally) lets down her hair. See? All she needed was a few beers. It’s a stupid movie, but the quality of the acting earns it above average marks.
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