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15/4/06 08:53![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsI will, I promise, post something more about the trip, but this isn't it. This is a palate clearing exercise, because I spent nearly six hours on a plane yesterday (after three hours in a car getting to the airport) with two kids, a book that was lagging in the middle, and a husband who is recovering from bronchitis (tho' not fast enough for my snarky self). Also on the flight, two movies (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe and The Family Stone), one of which I had seen before. The other...
The setup is: straightshooting man from charmingly eccentric family brings his neurotic fiancee home for the holidays. Home includes: humane, professorial father with funny streak but gravitas; charmingly eccentric, judgmental mother with secret (she's dying of cancer, and of course everyone will find out this weekend, despite her ostensible plan to wait until after the holiday); unpleasant sister who is the only one who's met the fiancee and totally hates her and wants the family to hate her too; married sister who spends most of the time not doing much except riding herd on her precocious eight year old; gay, deaf brother whose partner, known and loved by the family, is not deaf but is black; and artistic, beer drinking brother who shows up late. Uptight fiancee expects everyone to hate her, and of course everyone (or, really, Mom and Unpleasant Sister) do, and make sure UF shows her very worst side. She gets so upset that she calls her sister to come support her. Instead, Sister winds up catching the eye of the straightshooter; UF gets drunk, loosens her hair, winds up with artistic brother. By the time we see the one-year-later coda, Mom is dead, the gay couple has adopted a child, UF, no longer so uptight, has coupled up with artistic brother and presumably moved to San Francisco with him; boring married sister has had another child; unpleasant sister has coupled up with a guy she kept swearing she wasn't interested in earlier in the film, and Sister and Straightshooter are a couple.
The movie is a nice looking train wreck that wants to have everything both ways. When we meet her the Neurotic Fiancee (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) is talking on her cell as Straightshooter (played by Dermot Mulroney, Mr. Bland), barking orders to a subordinate at the investment bank at which she works. Bad Evil Career Woman! Bossing People! Including fiancee! She's clearly neurotic, because she wears her hair pulled back tightly and dresses very very expensively. She has no tolerance for variation in life, and consistently puts her foot in her mouth. Of course, the eccentric, loosey-goosey family expects her to be as eccentric as they are, and they're set up to be affectionate and fun, the complete opposite of the NF. Sending her to this family is like shooting fish in a barrel, and you know (when the Straightshooter admits that when he met NF on the way to visit a shrine in Taiwan that he'd always wanted to see, he never made it there, and NF tosses this off as unimportant) that their relationship is doomed--just as you know that when NF makes an elaborate dish for Christmas breakfast that it's going to be a colossal failure. You know, as well, that when NF storms out of the house it's Arty Brother (Luke Wilson, and his jaw) who's going to find her, take her to a bar, and she'll get drunk and their relationship will, um, change. And the minute the SIster (Claire Danes) gets off the bus you know that Straightshooter is doomed, totally smitten, and tossed into the slapstick of "I'm almost engaged to her sister! How can I be falling in love with her?"
Then it descends to slapstick, with people sliding all over the floor on the remains of the spilled Christmas breakfast. And Diane Keaton (that would be the mother, doing eccentric on top of maternal) dies shortly afterward and Craig Nelson (the father) looks dewy eyed, as I suppose he would, but by that time I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be amused, appalled, uplifted, or annoyed.
So I went with annoyed. Sheesh.
The setup is: straightshooting man from charmingly eccentric family brings his neurotic fiancee home for the holidays. Home includes: humane, professorial father with funny streak but gravitas; charmingly eccentric, judgmental mother with secret (she's dying of cancer, and of course everyone will find out this weekend, despite her ostensible plan to wait until after the holiday); unpleasant sister who is the only one who's met the fiancee and totally hates her and wants the family to hate her too; married sister who spends most of the time not doing much except riding herd on her precocious eight year old; gay, deaf brother whose partner, known and loved by the family, is not deaf but is black; and artistic, beer drinking brother who shows up late. Uptight fiancee expects everyone to hate her, and of course everyone (or, really, Mom and Unpleasant Sister) do, and make sure UF shows her very worst side. She gets so upset that she calls her sister to come support her. Instead, Sister winds up catching the eye of the straightshooter; UF gets drunk, loosens her hair, winds up with artistic brother. By the time we see the one-year-later coda, Mom is dead, the gay couple has adopted a child, UF, no longer so uptight, has coupled up with artistic brother and presumably moved to San Francisco with him; boring married sister has had another child; unpleasant sister has coupled up with a guy she kept swearing she wasn't interested in earlier in the film, and Sister and Straightshooter are a couple.
The movie is a nice looking train wreck that wants to have everything both ways. When we meet her the Neurotic Fiancee (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) is talking on her cell as Straightshooter (played by Dermot Mulroney, Mr. Bland), barking orders to a subordinate at the investment bank at which she works. Bad Evil Career Woman! Bossing People! Including fiancee! She's clearly neurotic, because she wears her hair pulled back tightly and dresses very very expensively. She has no tolerance for variation in life, and consistently puts her foot in her mouth. Of course, the eccentric, loosey-goosey family expects her to be as eccentric as they are, and they're set up to be affectionate and fun, the complete opposite of the NF. Sending her to this family is like shooting fish in a barrel, and you know (when the Straightshooter admits that when he met NF on the way to visit a shrine in Taiwan that he'd always wanted to see, he never made it there, and NF tosses this off as unimportant) that their relationship is doomed--just as you know that when NF makes an elaborate dish for Christmas breakfast that it's going to be a colossal failure. You know, as well, that when NF storms out of the house it's Arty Brother (Luke Wilson, and his jaw) who's going to find her, take her to a bar, and she'll get drunk and their relationship will, um, change. And the minute the SIster (Claire Danes) gets off the bus you know that Straightshooter is doomed, totally smitten, and tossed into the slapstick of "I'm almost engaged to her sister! How can I be falling in love with her?"
Then it descends to slapstick, with people sliding all over the floor on the remains of the spilled Christmas breakfast. And Diane Keaton (that would be the mother, doing eccentric on top of maternal) dies shortly afterward and Craig Nelson (the father) looks dewy eyed, as I suppose he would, but by that time I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be amused, appalled, uplifted, or annoyed.
So I went with annoyed. Sheesh.