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’TIS THE SEASON
the family stone
Christmas, which used to be the time everyone loved, seems to be losing a little of its shine these days - at any rate in the movies. Over each of the past few festive seasons, there has been one or more films in which the tree might as well have had barbed-wire, not tinsel, on it. Of course, things usually work out in the end; but it seems that, these days, Christmas is not always the season to be jolly.
The Stones - matriarch Sybil (Diane Keaton) and college-professor husband Kelly (Craig T Nelson) - are the latest to see the season of joy and happiness spring a leak. They are the established New England family at the heart of The Family Stone, complete with strong bonds and a general air of bohemian togetherness. Trouble is, all this cosy togetherness is hard to become part of, especially if - like Meredith Morton, the cosmopolitan career woman played in the film by Sex in the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker - you not only live by totally different values but turn up for Christmas as the partner of the family’s eldest son, Everett (Dermot Mulroney).
The first time we see Meredith, she’s barking orders into her mobile phone to those back at the office while she drags Everett round on a final Christmas-shopping outing. Like a lot of people entering the job market, Everett has reinvented himself as a Manhattan businessman. But, deep down, he’s still the same old Stone.
“Playing Everett was a challenge because he starts out very button-downed and strait-laced, but by the end of the story he returns to his real personality,” explains Mulroney. “Deep down in his heart, Everett isn’t the over-achieving, submissive ‘suit’ we see at the start of the film. He is really like the rest of the family: loose and kind of bohemian, with a fondness for free-flowing candid conversation and the laughter that often results.”
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