The Family Stone - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The film received generally mixed reviews from film critics. Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 52% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 151 reviews, with a rating average of 5.9 out of 10. The critical consensus is: "This family holiday dramedy features fine performances but awkward shifts of tone." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from film critics, has a rating score of 56 based on 35 reviews.

On the negative side, Manohla Dargis opened her damning review in the New York Times, with "All happy families resemble one another, Tolstoy famously wrote, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but Tolstoy didn't know the Stones, who are happy in a Hollywood kind of way and unhappy in a self-help kind of way. This tribe of ravenous cannibals bares its excellent teeth at anyone who doesn't accommodate the family's preening self-regard." and went on from there to blister the film for almost every scene and aspect. Among her sharper comments were:

"There are few character types Hollywood loves to hate more than the female business executive, what the movies once called a 'career woman.'"

"The hitch here is that Mom is fairly monstrous, and most of her five kids fairly unbearable."

"Shrouded in saintliness and as neutered as geldings, Thad and Patrick offer further proof that as far as pop culture representation is concerned, gay men are fine, as long as they're redecorating or straighter than straight."

"... the women are pills, but they're also far more fun to watch than the men, who all are terribly kind and dull, dull, dull."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four. He stated the film "is silly at times, leaning toward the screwball tradition of everyone racing around the house at the same time in a panic fueled by serial misunderstandings there is also a thoughtful side, involving the long and loving marriage of Sybil and Kelly." He further added, "The Family Stone sorts out its characters admirably, depends on typecasting to help establish its characters more quickly, and finds a winding path between happy and sad secrets to that moment when we realize that the Family Stone will always think of this fateful Christmas with a smile, and a tear."

In Variety, Justin Chang called the film "a smart, tart but mildly undercooked Christmas pudding" and added the "lovingly mounted ensembler has many heartfelt moments and a keen ear for the rhythms of domestic life, which make the neatly gift-wrapped outcome somewhat disappointing ... Bezucha tosses the viewer into every conversation headfirst, deploying a rough, at times disorienting visual style that works in rhythm with the layers of overlapping dialogue to deliver a pleasingly antic, semi-improvisational feel ... but while individual scenes have an authentically off-the-cuff feel, the narrative structure as a whole feels a tad schematic."

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said, "A contemporary version of the traditional screwball romantic comedy, The Family Stone is a film that's at times as ragged and shaggy as its family unit. But as written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, its offbeat mixture of highly choreographed comic crises and the occasional bite of reality make for an unexpectedly enticing blend." In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers rated the film three out of a possible four stars and added, "It's a comedy with a dash of tragedy – the kind of thing that usually makes me puke. But I fell for this one ... Writer-director Thomas Bezucha lays it on thick, but he knows the mad-dog anarchy of family life and gives the laughs a sharp comic edge."