Deep Diving

Whatever comedy writers borrow from Shakespeare in terms of partner switching, what is funny in translation from the Elizabethan age becomes circumscribed in American films. The Family Stone (2005) suffers from as much, with shades of the white neo-beatniks, the good guys in this case, and shades of the white power professional, encapsulated by a Sarah Jessica Parker fresh off her Sex and the City run, pretty, affluent, misguided about materialism and soul, and to really strain the issue of social propriety, the gay son is deaf and in a cross race attachment. Pow, and oh no here she goes, but no, I am not going, except to point out that if the black actor had attitude like James Brown, and if the cute white son looked more like my old friend Jimmi with his gluttonous pallor and Goth nail polish, the film would have flopped, but Tyrone and Brian are just cute and cuddly, with the bare minimum of eroticism needed so as not to create any threatening aspect. On a superficial level, Stone may seem vastly different than The Brady Bunch, but it runs virtually the same playbook, with the English romantic miscues thrown in. You might ask me what risks I wanted it to take, and it is simple, real life doesn't erupt with lightning rod realizations; no matter what the studio system does, it virtually always distorts representations.