(Merry Christmas, by the way!)
I mentioned yesterday that my problem with many if not most modern Christmas movies is that they absolutely strangle you with the Christmas. Every plot point is about some Christmas-related pageant, shopping excursion or decoration competition, and the movie is festooned with crass physical representations of Christmas -- or even tasteful ones that become crass through their sheer number.
Well, as I finished off my wrapping and cooking on Christmas Eve, this year I rewatched a film that has just a touch of Christmas by comparison.
Thomas Bezucha's The Family Stone is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. I'm sure that's not the reason most of those who are watching it this year are watching it. They are also honoring star Diane Keaton in the first Christmas after her passing, which is especially wrenching in a movie where she has cancer and is trying to wait until after Christmas to reveal it (best of luck there, no screenwriter would allow that).
The distributor didn't really know what to do with The Family Stone when they first released it in 2005. Although it had a Christmas release -- like, just before Christmas, on December 16th -- that angle was not particularly played up at the time. In fact, if you read this post that I wrote in 2012, you'll know just how little they played it up, including no mention of Christmas on the DVD copy, and releasing it on DVD the following April rather than waiting until November, as would be traditional for a Christmas movie. (You'll see from the poster above that they did ultimately conjure up some more traditional Christmas-related advertising for the movie.)
And maybe that was possible because of the aforementioned small quantity of Christmas.
If The Family Stone were made today, they would probably shove the Christmas of it down our throats. It's the same as they would never release Die Hard in July (or was it August?) if they made it today. Any Christmas aspect to it would have been amplified by studio notes, and the advertising would capitalize on it, 100%.
But though The Family Stone takes place almost exclusively on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, this is a movie about these characters, not specifically what errands they have to run related to Christmas. In fact, there is nary a Christmas errand in this whole movie, just a lot of conversations, some funny, more heavy.
In fact, on what I was suprised to discover is only my second viewing of the movie, I was even more surprised to learn what little percentage of this is actually geared toward laughs. Yeah there's that bit where Claire Danes' character takes a goofy header down the stairs getting off the bus, or where Stone brothers Dermot Mulroney and Luke Wilson engage in a comical wrestling match on their kitchen floor -- though it's anything but comical for the characters. And there are certainly plenty of jovial interactions. But there's also a melancholy hanging over this movie that only gets further explicated as the plot goes along.
And thank goodness it's only a little bit about Christmas, because that allows all these tones to ultimately bring out the warmth, the combativeness, and the just plain seeming truthfulness of this extended clan, who just so happen to be gathered for the biggest Hallmark holiday there is.
It's exactly the percentage of Christmas I needed this year -- enough to remind me that, in fact, it is that time of year, a time of year of great joy for some people and great pain for others. We're experiencing both this year, and that was better reflected in my Christmas Eve viewing by a movie that grapples with both, rather than shoving ugly Christmas sweaters down my throat for 90 minutes.
And as for Diane Keaton ... I was also surprised to find her to be less of the kooky Connecticut liberal mom than I thought she was, and than I eulogized her as when I mentioned this movie a few months ago when she died. She's a real person here, too, prone to her personal weaknesses, her judgments, her disappointments at how things are going in what she knows may be her last Christmas, when she should just let go and love as much as she can.
That's to the credit of The Family Stone, and it's a reminder to us all to let go and love as much as we can, especially this time of year, especially since we are never sure how much time we may still have with the ones we love the most.
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