It starts with the bun.
A very tight close-up, to be precise, of the back of Meredith Morton's head, and a bun so tightly wound that we're almost afraid to see how tightly drawn her face must be. As played by Sarah Jessica Parker, Meredith is very tightly drawn indeed, barking orders into her cell phone and "helping" her boyfriend Everett (Dermot Mulroney) buy Christmas presents for his family ("No, the red one," she says as he picks a sweater; he shrugs and buys the red one.)
Meredith is perhaps even more tense than usual, as Everett is taking her home for Christmas to meet the rest of the Stones. We get to meet them first, and they are an intimidatingly warm, close-knit bunch -- parents Sybil and Kelly (Diane Keaton, Craig T. Nelson); perky rebel Amy (Rachel McAdams); big sister Susannah (Elisabeth Reaser), pregnant with her second; brother Thad (Tyrone Giordano), who's deaf, gay, and in an interracial relationship; and the closest thing the Stones have to a black sheep, stoner Ben (Luke Wilson).
Needless to say, Meredith doesn't fit in -- none of the Stone women has ever worn her hair in a bun -- and it seems painfully clear that this will be one of those cloying, uplifting holiday movies in which the uptight city girl is taught to be lovable and, quite literally, to let her hair down.
The pleasant surprise, though, is that while writer-director Thomas Bezucha doesn't avoid all of the obvious cliches, he avoids enough of them to produce a solidly entertaining movie with fine performances from one of the year's best ensemble casts. The actors playing the Stones get special recognition for having given thought to every single relationship in that familiy; we may never get a major scene featuring Thad and Susannah, for instance, but in their small interactions we can see a very precise dynamic, and we're always aware of the shorthand that family members use to communicate (and to exclude outsiders).
One of the movie's nicest surprises is that Meredith isn't the only one blamed for her disconnect with the Stones; close-knit families really can be intimidating and hard to break into, and Bezucha isn't afraid to show us the smugness that sometimes accompanies that kind of snugness.
Yes, I could have done without the extended slapstick sequence late in the movie, and there's a Tragic Subplot that feels a bit tacked-on, but these actors are so good -- Keaton, Nelson, and (much to my surprise) Parker are the standouts -- and there's such sincerity and warmth in the movie that the flaws and the occasional bit of predictability don't matter quite so much. (Had I been blogging five years ago, I'd have said almost exactly the same thing about Bezucha's first film, the charming gay romance Big Eden.) An unexpectedly sweet holiday delight.
No comments:
Post a Comment