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Culture War Artifact Analysis: Holiday Edition - The Family Stone
There is very little to discuss about this extremely boring movie. Diane Keaton simply Diane Keatons for a long time.
It is primarily a fable about the importance of hospitality. A pack of mannerless hicks torments their guest during an important religious holiday. They make her feel like an imposition, they treat her property disrespectfully, her partner refuses to engage in the most basic of social assistance. In retribution, the gods strike down Diane Keaton.
Blue Tribe America, especially in their youth, identify with the family. This is why their revolutions will always fail. SJP, for all her faults, is clearly portrayed as absolutely innocent. Anyone who watches this movie and feels anything but satisfaction when those jackals cry is your enemy.
Happy Holidays!
Your post is clever, how you reframe the film, but without actually making it an "effort post," I think it's lacking, clarity and not overly helpful if one hasn't seen the film. The film is a Culture War Artifact or time capsule worthy of discussion. It demonstrates both how long "woke" narratives have been pushed (much longer than this) and how tropes have changed.
Spoiler: The family is actually the most gentry of gentry living in a huge house in New England with a progressive bohemian aesthetic. They are ever so willing to signal their tolerance and encouragement of their young daughter's fornicating and their gay, interracial, deaf son's desire to adopt a child, yet they are cruel to Sarah Jessica Parker's character for the slightest of faux pas... or is it a slight faux pas and not a full on cancellable offense?
A film that I just watched that is quite the Culture War time capsule is the very good 1960 classic The Apartment.
An interesting point is that the synopsis hints the family are not the tolerant, accepting liberals they pretend to be:
Patrick is the black boyfriend of the deaf gay son. So the wonderful, bohemian, free-spirited Stones were a teensy bit racist when their son showed up with a black man? He had to prove he could fit in before they'd accept him?
As you say, the Stones are the most gentry of gentry: father is an academic, mother is the iron fist in the velvet glove, and when a guest who is trying to fit in with them but is clumsy and ignorant of the right way to signal the right attributes turns up, they are cruel to her. She's not even an antagonist, because she wants to be part of the family, she just doesn't know all the right shibboleths (and gosh that does sound right in Culture War terms). Her offence is not being malleable enough, unlike her sister who is already cast in the mould of upper middle-class artistic liberal, until at the end she permits herself to be melted down and re-cast (wear the clothes of the family, take up as the responsible partner who will be mother as much as girlfriend to the skeevy brother) as they want her to be (particularly Mom, who probably is the one not at all happy that outsiders are taking away her darling sons and replacing her as the most important figure in their lives, see black boyfriend and SJP's character).
That's the rad-fem angle there: a woman must be malleable, must fit herself to the expectations of others, must be at the service of men/institutions of society as they wish her to be, must lose her own character, wishes, and wants to become the acceptable object.
This movie vaguely traumatized me as a 15-year-old girl who saw it in theatre (with my much-cooler sister, even!). You have articulated why better than I was ever able to myself. Well, the feminist aspect at least. There's also some degree of a message of "no one will ever like you if you aren't laid-back and cool; being uptight and tone-deaf is the worst thing you could ever possibly be." Like, the Stone family isn't portrayed as actually being wrong! They just were maybe insufficiently coy about it, in the movie's eyes, I think.
Weirdly I also kind of liked it, at the time, and also liked it when I recently re-watched it, twenty years later. It's very rare to find media that lays these messages so bare so honestly. I do view it as much closer to a black comedy or a family drama with comedic relief elements than an actual comedy or rom-com though.
I haven't seen it, as I said I'm just going by the synopsis. But there's certainly room there for a deeper digging into "are the Stones really this cool family in truth, or are they just as uptight and repressive, just in a different form that is masked by 'we're all liberal and accepting here'?" By the sound of it, they absolutely did their best to force SJP's character into the mould of what they deemed 'correct', until they managed to break her down to be rebuilt in the acceptable format.
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