Happy (?) Holidays: Vol. 1
Christmas in quarantine and the Love It or Hate It "I don't care what you think of me"-ness of The Family Stone
The holidays are here, and for the first time ever, I will not be with my family at all for Christmas. It will be a quieter celebration with just me, my boyfriend, my tree, and probably Chinese food (a NYC holiday season staple). There won’t be raucous wrapping paper-throwing across my living room or yelling expletives while working on a difficult 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle all day together that my brother and sister-in-law wind up diligently finishing. No snoring from my dad in his recliner after our Christmas dinner while my mom and I try to read on the couch. While I’m excited to create some new traditions this year with my boyfriend, it’s also tinged with a lot of sadness.
And isn’t that just what Christmas is about? Holiday magic tinged with some sadness.
We’re all sad and exhausted and overwhelmed and anxious, and frankly, just fucking OVER it. But the relief, to me anyway, is knowing that I’m not the only person who feels this way right now. Like Blanche DuBois, I too “want magic” this time of year, but I also want reality—and the reality is that Christmas is a sad time for a lot of people, and this Christmas in particular is sad. I want to watch things that make me feel good while also acknowledging that people/things are not perfect.
This is not to say I am not above enjoying the smooth-brained entertainment of Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square or any/every Hallmark Channel holiday movie about heroines leaving the big city to return to their rural hometowns only to fall in love with a grumpy yet hot local who looks like an L.L. Bean model. But in general, I need my holiday movies to acknowledge the reality that many people are going through this year—loneliness, depression, longing, grief—while also doing their damndest to soothe them.
So to that end, let’s kick things off with the Love It or Hate It Holiday Fave:
The Family Stone
This movie has everything: hijinks, cozy sweaters, a game of charades gone horribly wrong, a dinner table conversation ALSO gone horribly wrong, NPR tote bags, Rachel McAdams stealing the movie, Diane Keaton with a Rogue from X-Men white streak in her hair as a mom dying from cancer, siblings swapping partners, gay couple goals, Dermot Mulroney and his little lip scar looking hot, and just a lot of general snooty, white, New England liberal family bullshit.
And yet, it has also become a tried and true—and often polarizing—holiday classic. It’s something I now seek out year after year despite my own aversion to family holiday discord. For better and worse, the members of the Stone family feel like a real family: they bicker, have strange traditions, are opinionated, love to eat, and are not always welcoming. Someone like uptight Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) threatens to disrupt their dynamic, so they mostly close ranks.
Meredith is the lens through which we’re supposed to view the Stone family—she’s the buttoned-up, workaholic, business-suited outsider who doesn’t fit into their laidback crew at first glance. As she rants later in the movie, they all see her as the “spoiled, racist, crazy, bigoted bitch from Bedford.” In some ways, their assessment of her is true. She only seemed to pack stilettos for a snowy holiday in a rural town (which is giving me BIG Real Housewives of Salt Lake City vibes where those ladies wear Jimmy Choos on ice and in snow) and she disastrously puts her foot in her mouth during a Christmas Eve dinner conversation about bi-racial gay parenting. But in fairness, the family—outside dopey Ben (Luke Wilson)—doesn’t really do a lot to make her feel comfortable. It’s like Pride & Prejudice wherein Meredith is prideful and the family is inexplicably prejudiced against her for no apparent reason other than she has a weird throat-clearing thing, is socially anxious, and isn’t hippy dippy like they are.
The Stone family is like the family in Get Out—you just know they’d vote for Obama a third time if they could. They are very well-meaning liberal white people (who also talk openly about people losing their virginity—which was a shock to my conservative Midwestern upbringing the first time I watched this as no one ever talks about sex EVER), but they go out of their way to prove how much better they are than Meredith, a person none of them but Amy (Rachel McAdams) have met in person until now. We are told Amy doesn’t really like anyone much at first, but we never really get a full explanation for why she is so hostile to everyone/everything other than being an antagonist to our antagonist (Meredith) and maybe because her mom, Sybil (Diane Keaton), is dying of cancer. Meredith tries to retort, “I don’t care if you like me” and Amy takes an amused sip of her coffee from her favorite holiday mug (we all have them—mine is probably my Dad’s mug that has Santa with a Baroque wig sitting at a piano that says “Santa’s Bach”) and says back, “Awww yes you do.”
All families have their own weird, specific tests for entry into the club, and Meredith is just failing each one spectacularly in The Family Stone.
For his part, Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney), Meredith’s boyfriend and almost-fiancé is basically no help whatsoever in making her feel more comfortable with his family either, which is frankly nuts!!! It’s also a sign of how doomed their relationship is. Maybe it’s just me, but if I were Meredith and my almost-fiancé mealy-mouthed his way through defenses of me to his family and then let my sister Julie (Claire Danes) ingratiate herself on everyone and try on my almost-engagement ring, I’d put my expensive stilettos in their beautifully-turtlenecked necks. That’s just me, and I am—as you know—a Scorpio who has no time for bullshit or disloyalty.
All this to say that I have a lot of questions about what The Family Stone is trying to accomplish in terms of who we’re supposed to like and hate. There’s a lot of conflicting information and shifting feelings throughout the movie—not just between the characters but the audience and the movie itself. Who are we supposed to root for? Who’s our favorite family member? Should Everett marry a woman his family clearly doesn’t like for various reasons? Should our families be allowed to have so much influence over who gets to join them through marriage or otherwise? The movie is messy, but so is family.
The Family Stone is a movie trying to do maybe too many things and with varying levels of success. It’s a fish-out-of-water movie, a screwball comedy, a dying parent drama, a romance, and a holiday movie. There’s a lot going on, and it doesn’t always execute it as smoothly as it wants, but isn’t that how the holidays go? You plan and plan and try to make everything perfect, but no matter how much you plan, things happen to throw off your plan. It’s never perfect, but it’s more memorable than if everything had gone smoothly—which is precisely the overarching theme of The Family Stone both within the story and the film’s overall execution.
In this way, The Family Stone is a great movie for this particular Christmas. This holiday season will be far from perfect for a lot of us. No large family gatherings. Traditions upended. We’re all going to be making the best of a bad situation, and that means doing things differently. This Christmas will be perfect in its imperfections—a reminder of a year where so much went wrong but also one that makes us cherish who and what we’ve got.
During the major climax of the movie on Christmas morning, Meredith—covered in the pans of strata she made the previous day after accidentally dropping them on herself—looks at Sybil and Amy and sobs, “What’s so great about you guys?”
“Oh nothing,” Sybil replies both crying and laughing with Amy and Meredith, “it’s just that we’re all we’ve got.”
Maybe your family isn’t perfect. Maybe this Christmas isn’t perfect. But hang onto them anyway. It’s all we’ve got.
Thanks so much for reading! As always, please drop me a line if you feel inclined.
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See you next time! Happy Holidays!
-Em