Thomas Bezucha’s big family drama-comedy The Family Stone sets its tone pretty early on, with eldest son Everett (Dermot Mulroney) bringing his long-time girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) home for the holidays. She’s apprehensive about meeting his family en masse, but she’s going to do her darndest to make a good impression – even though younger sister Amy (Rachel McAdams) has already been knocking and mocking Meredith to the assembled Stones. (“She’s got this ... throat-clearing tick. It’s like she’s digging for clams!”) Pausing in the foyer after she’s been introduced, Meredith tries to make a compliment: “You have a lovely home.” Everett’s mom Sibyl (Diane Keaton) shines a thin, polite smile: “All the better to entertain you with, my dear.” 

Meredith’s up against the Big, Bad WASP, and the rest of the numerous and slightly lunatic Stones. Complicating matters is that Everett intends to ask his mom for a family heirloom – Sibyl’s mother’s wedding ring – so he can propose to Meredith. Sibyl isn’t crazy about that idea; as we and the other Stones learn, Sibyl’s obsessing about her mom’s ring in spite of the fact – or, more accurately, because of the fact -- she has bigger things to worry about.

Written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, The Family Stone is as sprawling and messy as the clan at its center, with characters and plotlines and scenes tumbling over each other.  Like an overstuffed Christmas turkey that could be breeding salmonella, The Family Stone gets warm, but it’s so crowded and busy that it never really attains the kind of heat that could make sure it isn’t toxically clever and cute. To begin with, the Stone family is big – there’s Everett, Amy, Sibyl, dad Kelly (Craig T. Nelson), bohemian film editor Ben (Luke Wilson), pregnant Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) and littlest brother Thad (Ty Giordano), who’s brought home his partner Patrick (Brian White). And once Meredith’s constant shoving of her foot into her mouth forces her to move to the local inn and call home for emotional support, her sister Julie (Claire Danes) arrives and adds further complications. Bezucha knows how to assemble a big cast; he just doesn’t know how to give them anything to do.

Bezucha’s prior film, Big Eden, was a modestly successful gay-themed indie. I didn’t know much about Bezucha’s background prior to Big Eden, but it’s interesting that while watching The Family Stone I made a dismissive shorthand note how ‘the clothes and furnishings are more dimensional/better developed than the characters’ ... and then afterwards learned from the production notes that Bezucha’s past includes fashion and design senior executive positions for well-heeled brands like Coach and Ralph Lauren’s Polo.

The central engine of the film’s plot is that the loose, lunatic bohemian Stones don’t like Type-A Meredith. Parker plays Meredith as the kind of Blackberry-brandishing careerist who can blithely explain how she met Everett at a “post-post-reunification” conference in Hong Kong and then helped him perfect an IPO presentation. Go-getter Meredith knows that's when their relationship began -- but she doesn't have enough empathy or insight to see how meeting her kept him from the ferry trip he was going to take to see the biggest metal Buddha in the world, which now, it seems, haunts him as a lost opportunity.

The rest of the film’s about as obvious: When Thad and Patrick talk about how they want to adopt, Meredith first steps in trouble by asking if they worry that Thad’s deafness will be an impediment to child-rearing. She then compounds things by asking if they’d prefer their hypothetical child to be gay or “normal.” The scenes rings false – wouldn’t someone as cosmopolitan and successful as Meredith have better people skills? – but it does give Keaton a chance to make a speech which boils down to her declaration, paraphrasing Heathers, of “I love my deaf gay son!”

All of this makes The Family Stone sound much worse than it is: McAdams is nicely-tuned as the overly-feisty Amy, while Luke Wilson plays Ben as what could be, ironically enough, termed the Owen Wilson part – an agreeable, unreliable, dope-loving charmer. (As Meredith goes upstairs early on in the film, Ben calls to her: “Don’t dilly-dally, pretty lady; we’re all going to be down here talking about you.” Wilson spins the line so it’s honest and cutting at the same time.) And Keaton manages to take what could be a cliché character arc and invest it with real warmth, playing a woman fearless and terrified, centered and uncertain.

When Nelson, Danes, Parker and Mulroney don’t make the kind of impression they have in other films, it says a lot more about Bezucha’s script than it does about the level of craft they bring to the table. And, just as in Elizabethtown, Paul Schneider shows up to play Brad, which is pretty much his usual character – that somewhat unusual usual small-town guy, playing an ambulance driver who, as Sibyl blithely mentions to Meredith “ … popped Amy’s cherry …” and still carries a torch for her; Schneider’s loose, laid-back persona is a nice antidote to the forced frenzy Bezucha puts the rest of his actors through.

The Family Stone’s a pretty mixed set of elements. It’s being sold as a wacky comedy, but revolves around issues of love, life and death; it contains high-strung dramatic situations but stoops to get laughs out of pratfalls and food-based accidents. If one thing marks The Family Stone as a near-miss, it's in how it (like most big-studio romances) never bothers to show us anything like a real reason why these characters would fall for each other aside from the fact of their ranking in the cast listing and the pitches and changes of the script as it lurches towards the hugs-and-tears climax. The Family Stone may take its name from the diamond Everett wants to give Meredith, but the film would be a lot better if Bezucha had aspired to a diamond’s virtues – clarity, simplicity, a certain hardness and a few cutting edges – instead of squandering a talented cast on such a fuzzy, shapeless missed opportunity of a film.