It’s my staunch belief that Christmas movies are supposed to be insane. That’s because the season itself is insane, dark and cold, and lit up by lights that make you feel nostalgic for moments that may have never existed, full of frustration and the secret or not-so-secret longing for a miracle.
This year, the first night of Hanukkah also falls on Christmas Day, which makes celebrations bigger — if more exhausting for some of us — and as such, I’ve started my holiday movie re-watching season much earlier. There have been some bangers, and there have been some tears.
Coincidentally, I was recently asked what my favorite holiday movie is, and at this point in my life, it has to be The Family Stone, a film that’s not as crazy as Love, Actually, but still pretty epically reviled in many corners of the internet.
The first time I saw the movie, I was a college student sitting in a movie theater in Kentucky, having recently lost my cousin in a horrifying car accident, ruminating darkly on the fragility of family. I loved it, and cried.
In my late twenties, I decided on a re-watch and could not believe I’d loved this schmaltzy mess so much. And then in my late thirties, I came back to this family, to their large, lived-in house and furious dynamics being played for laughs, and I realized that The Family Stone is my perfect Christmas film, and here’s why:
At the heart of the movie is a tragic secret being harbored by Sybil the matriarch, played by Diane Keaton. Her eldest son Everett, Dermot Mulroney’s character (oh the CRUSH I had on Mulroney as a teenage girl), while not fully aware of the extent of his mother’s troubles, knows that something is wrong from the beginning of the film. Everett is trying to “fix” the situation by marrying a woman, Meredith, who is horribly wrong for him. Meredith is played by Sarah Jessica Parker, in full nervous tic and trademark angled neck mode — and as the patriarch of the family notes, “She doesn’t know or trust herself.”
Family is fragile. I knew it in that Kentucky movie theater, and I know it all too well now. And Thomas Bezucha, the writer and director of The Family Stone, knows it too.
We all know, deep in our hearts, that families change, and that they also end, which is why the best of us try so hard to build something on the crumbling foundations of our childhood lives.
Everyone in the film is trying, in their own ways — whether by the power of sheer bitchiness (as embodied in the film by Rachel McAdams) or via a dopey, ill-advised, but sincere quest for true love (as demonstrated by Owen Wilson’s character) or by building a new family in a world that will be hostile to it (Tyrone Giordano’s character).
Everett is the one who’s trying the hardest and is the most misguided. “Try to not be so perfect,” his distraught mother tells him as Christmas at home inevitably starts to unravel into chaos. Meredith is a highly accomplished but tightly wound woman, organically at odds with the large, loud, and progressive Stone clan. Ultimately, however, it’s not even Meredith’s retrograde politics that are the sticking issue — those can be overcome — it’s the fact that we invite disaster on ourselves when trying to be perfect.
The Family Stone is a movie that angles toward that proverbial Christmas miracle, but not in the way any of the characters expect. Sybil’s secret and its consequences cast a shadow over the holiday table and the messy, cozy bedrooms of her grown-up children (which she and her husband have preserved), and the situation she is in cannot be reversed or undone.
What does happen, however, is that life realigns itself, and to use a quote I’ll never get sick of, finds a way.
It’s not that Sybil is particularly saintly or easy to get along with, as the film makes clear. This is a woman who will gladly tell a holiday guest exactly who “popped” her youngest daughter’s “cherry,” while the daughter looks on in horror (a moment that still makes me cringe and laugh to this day).
Nobody is truly saintly in this movie (except for maybe the Claire Danes character, though she doesn’t have that much screen time). They’re just trying to be decent, to risk a little more light, even if they occasionally get burned in the process.
For this and many other reasons, including the scene in which Meredith wakes up in the wrong bed, including a game of charades gone horribly wrong and other low-key gems, The Family Stone is my favorite Christmas movie today.