The Family Stone

A combination of Meet the Parents X Home for the Holidays + While Your Were Sleeping.
The plot is Meet the Parents in reverse, with a "conservative" being un-welcomed into a liberal
family,but these are not the warm, eccentric Floridian Jewish liberals of Meet the Fockers, but rather cold, bourgeois Yankee WASP liberals. The tone is more serious, and the comedy less broad. And in contrast to today's usual practice, there is sparing use of scoring to evoke an emotional response in the audience.

Sarah Jessica Parker, surely a liberal in real life, is persuasive as a conservative woman.

My favorite part was watching Rachel McAdams do her Parker Posey imitation. (And does NPR really have tote bags?)

Also, if being "gay" is like being black, as some argue, wouldn't it follow that gay people cannot be played by straight people? There is a gay couple in this film, but no sexual chemistry between them, they just seem like really good friends who can cook and are sensitive, and I wonder if the actors themselves are straight...