The slapstick weeper The Family Stone is a lump of coal brightened by four diamond-sharp performances. Would you pay to see a home-for-the-holidays family reunion where siblings snark at big bro's girlfriend, when for free you can play this interactive game at Mom and Dad's?

The clan in The Family Stone - the title of which refers both to their surname and to Granny's solitaire - is a judgmental tribe that one should suspend judgment of until more facts are known.

Alas for Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), the tightly wound girlfriend of Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney), the family makes a snap judgment about her. Humorless. Uptight. Corporate.

Meredith does not impress Sybil and Kelly Stone (Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson), bohemian/bourgeois intellectuals whose cozy central-hall colonial in an Amhersty college town is as far from Wisteria Lane and as close to the ethnic-chic Wisteria catalog as it can get.

The Stones pride themselves on tolerance yet are remarkably intolerant of Meredith, who wilts under the hot glare of their scorn. Sybil snorts when she hears that Meredith doesn't feel right sleeping with Everett in his parents' house. Amy (Rachel McAdams), a free-spirited schoolteacher, makes fun of Meredith's propriety and also the way she clears her throat.

When Everett sees Meredith in his own natural habitat, even the most conventional of the Stones must admit that she doesn't fit. Only Ben (Luke Wilson), a pothead documentary filmmaker, warms to Meredith. This, even after the nervous newcomer insults brother Thad (Tyrone Giordano), who is deaf, and his partner, Patrick (Brian White), who is black.

From Meet the Fockers to Monster-in-Law, from Shrek 2 to Guess Who, our screens are inundated with films about the girl who brings home a boy who doesn't look like Dad and the boy who brings home a girl who doesn't look or act like Mom. Clearly these movies reflect the growing number of interfaith, interracial and same-sex marriages, with comedy defusing the social anxiety of these unions.

The Family Stone and this year's Junebug differ from these in that they're about men who act different around their girlfriends than they do around their mothers and have a hard time reconciling where they've come from with who they are. Both films underscore what one might call red state-blue state tensions and, despite the pratfalls in Stone, don't see this as the stuff of comedy.

Written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, onetime store designer for Ralph Lauren, The Family Stone gets more involving once the facts are disclosed. Then we understand that Sybil and Amy aren't horrible people, but that something horrible is happening that they can't share with an outsider.

While I didn't buy the abrupt shifts in character, I very much enjoyed Keaton's fire-and-ice-cream turn, Nelson's cidery warmth, and McAdams' sauciness, but most especially Wilson's vibe as the family healer who convinces outsiders that everybody must get Stoned.

Produced by Michael London, written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, photography by Jonathan Brown, music by Michael Giacchino, distributed by Twentieth Century Fox.

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