This essay is part of Avidly’s Rom Com Superlatives series
Diane Keaton looks at her Christmas tree. She’s alone, she’s sad, and she’s wearing a truly fantastic outfit: white turtleneck, brown and cream striped silk shirt tied at the waist, wide-legged fawn-coloured trousers, chunky metal bracelets. Her house is huge; her hair is perfect.
In her role in The Family Stone (2005) as matriarch Sybil, Keaton wears several further glorious outfits. Her impeccable lux/casual layering – think crisp white men’s shirts with knitwear and pyjamas – serves as a key sartorial clue for what’s to come in this film. She’s put-together, but comfortable. She can look stylish but also take a nap anytime she likes. She is also, as we will discover, incredibly ill – and this will be her last Christmas.
As Sybil’s adult children descend on the house for the holiday, unaware as yet that their mother’s cancer has returned, The Family Stone joins the populous ranks of RomComs that tell a love story about grief. Or more specifically, of RomComs where everything about the romance — its motivations, its obstacles, its quirks — responds, to a surprising degree, to the death of a parent.
The Family Stone is the best RomCom about a parent dying. How can I argue this? Sleepless in Seattle exists, after all, and is – who would deny it – flawless. You might (inexplicably, sorry) prefer Love Actually, or The Holiday. Parental loss also informs You’ve Got Mail, Clueless, Sense and Sensibility (yes, it’s a RomCom!), Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, any number of Hallmark movies, and even Pretty Woman. And if you’ve never noticed before just how many RomComs involve dead parents, I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you. I’ve also got bad news about a lot of Disney films.
My parents died in 2015. Almost every December now, my younger sister and I will each watch The Family Stone to marvel at Sarah Jessica Parker’s physical comedy, to scream at the skin-peelingly-awkward dinner table debate in the film’s central scene, but most importantly to have a cathartic Christmas cry. Our sustained attraction to the movie surprises me. There are films in which parents die – or might die – that I now simply refuse to watch. I weigh things up: how much a film might upset me vs how good I think the film could be. Will it be worth it? The inevitable gasping tears? The reminder that I can still get upset like this? Somehow, The Family Stone – a frankly odd film which revolves around, relies upon, and is at every point informed by a looming parental loss – is worth it.
Maybe it’s because I have had one of these Christmases: a last Christmas, when someone is catastrophically ill. I understand deeply how The Family Stone’s peculiar, almost jarring combination of slapstick comedy, screwball plotting, family tragedy, and romance makes sense through grief: through a grief you’ve begun in advance, that will still not prepare you for the grief yet to come. You laugh too hard at weird things, then cry soon after. Stuff gets dropped, split, tripped over, mislaid. Decisions are made too quickly or agonised over. It can be impossible to say – or really know – what you feel.
What marks The Family Stone apart from so many other grief-stricken RomComs is that the death of a parent – the experience of grief itself – is not just the set-up. Death in The Family Stone is not something that’s already happened, nor does it happen right at the beginning of the film. It isn’t tidied away safely in the background, it’s not a framing device, it doesn’t clear the way for romance nor make space for feelings to be felt and events to unfold. The Family Stone puts death in the near-future. And it manages to do so without making an impending bereavement feel like a crass plotting device.
Here’s the story: Everett Stone (a muted Dermot Mulroney) brings his nervous, uptight girlfriend Meredith (SJP! SJP!) home to meet his family for Christmas. Sybil and Kelly Stone are wealthy, intelligent, maybe even ‘eccentric’: they have stacks of books on bedside tables, five adult children, and family legends about wishing all their kids were gay. We’re in New England, snow is falling, and nearly everyone hates Meredith.
The Stones communicate in a comfortable mixture of spoken and signed language. Everett’s brother Thad is deaf, and Ty Giordano, the deaf actor who plays him, brought an American Sign Language tutor to the film set to work closely with the other actors. Meredith’s awkwardness with the family becomes clear at several points via her inability to communicate well with Thad; ‘Why is she shouting?’ he asks, when they first meet. The family can shift easily through speech, signing, and lip-reading, just as they can change registers from sarcastic to earnest, gossipy to private. They are quick, they are clever, and they tend to give newcomers a hard time.
Meredith makes several faux pas of escalating awfulness, but she’s also not given a chance by some of the Stones. After a spectacularly cold and snappy reception by Sybil, a lack of support from Everett, and increasingly bullying behaviour by his sister Amy, on Christmas Eve Meredith tearfully flees the Stone household in favour of a local inn and invites her sister out to New England for support. Where Meredith remains an outsider, her sister Julie (Claire Danes, gorgeous) navigates the family with effortless charm. The film unspools around the family’s disapproval of Meredith, and Everett’s insistence that, despite feeling little towards her, he will propose. The stage is set for some screwball partner-swapping between Everett, his brother Ben, Meredith, and her sister Julie. Eventually, and gradually, we come to understand that there’s more to the terrible behaviour exhibited by the Stones: we learn that Sybil has had breast cancer, and that it has now returned.
Thinking seriously about the narrative function of bereavement in RomComs both troubles and fascinates me. I adore Sleepless in Seattle (and own a t-shirt that simply reads NORA EPHRON), but I can’t help but see the neat and useful shape of Tom Hanks’ grief. A tragic but narratively prefatory loss creates the most attractive widower ever, who seems to perfectly process his feelings and raise his son before getting on the radio to serenade the people of America with his description of love as ‘coming home’. It’s a structure with strong roots: think of Mr Dashwood’s death in Sense and Sensibility, which — combined with misogynistic inheritance laws — facilitates the whole plot. Meg Ryan’s grief for her mother, a bereavement that occurs before You’ve Got Mail even begins, leads her to be extra-sentimental about her unprofitable children’s book shop and probably blinds her to the awfulness of her dogmatic luddite writer boyfriend. And in Love Actually, death makes way for a grey-cashmere-clad, handsomely sad step-dad: Liam Neeson.
The Family Stone, structured around a revelation of terminal illness, certainly runs the risk of Sybil’s diagnosis and/or her eventual death being cheapened, turned into a plot device – or, even worse, a plot twist. The film avoids this by being, I think, incredibly kind to its audience. We find things out gently, in stages. It’s gradual without being cruelly drawn-out, there is no bombshell moment designed to create a cheap shock reaction. We learn – amid family clashes and unravelling romance – that something is wrong, that Sybil is ill, that she has been ill before, and how bad it is this time.
This painful but careful storytelling allows the film to show something so true: just how shitty and dissonant your behaviour can be in the face of death. A cancer diagnosis in the family messes up things like Christmas, or the way your heart works. The Family Stone takes that mess, and puts a romantic-comedy-drama into it.
It’s this mad hybrid that I appreciate so much in The Family Stone, its combination of key RomCom elements with an insightful and tender representation of imminent grief. I love the ideal relationships we’re shown between Sybil and Kelly or Thad and his boyfriend Patrick. I love the vital weepy montage that leads us into the final act. I love how overdone the at-first-sight meetings are between Meredith and Ben, Everett and Julie. I love that the film is all about Everett not knowing what he wants: a classic RomCom concern yet also, as I have known first-hand, something that grief can do.
Most of all, I love the quiet centrality of Sybil. She’s gazing at a Christmas tree, waiting for coffee to brew, looking at the snow, reading in bed while wearing an inexplicably uncreased white shirt. Those outfits! A lesson in self-soothing through excellent clothing. And though The Family Stone ends with the traditional paired-up neatness of any great RomCom, it does so by showing us the next Christmas. The first Christmas without Sybil. As Kelly welcomes everyone home, and the lights are hung upon the tree, there is no tidying away of Sybil’s death. She smiles at us all serenely from a photograph on the wall, in the film’s final shot.
Sophie Corser is a writer and researcher based in London, UK, who has only recently noticed that she’s stolen Sybil Stone’s hairstyle.