The Family Stone, Without Diane Keaton: “So Much of the Sequel Is About Her Absence”

Gasps as a Christmas Eve dinner implodes. Knowing groans when a pair of overflowing casserole dishes topple from Sarah Jessica Parker’s grasp. And a choked sob from one overcome woman watching the heartbreaking final scene. The sounds coming from a recent sold-out 20th anniversary screening of The Family Stone in Brooklyn may suggest it’s more horror than holiday film. “Some people would say it is,” writer-director Thomas Bezucha tells Vanity Fair with a knowing smirk. “In my mind, it was always a musical comedy.”

The starry yuletide romp centers around a free-spirited New England family meeting its eldest son Everett’s (Dermot Mulroney) straight-laced girlfriend, Meredith (SJP, fresh off Sex and the City), only to have the shag rug pulled out from beneath them when Keaton’s pugnacious matriarch gets killed off by cancer. Bezucha likening the film to a musical may explain the movie’s eventual brothers-marry-sisters twist straight out of the MGM Golden Age musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It definitely justifies Bezucha’s go-to writing song, The Sound of Music’s “The Lonely Goatherd,” an infuriatingly buoyant waltz meant to keep the audience on edge as The Family Stone’s haunting premise comes into focus: What if you knew this was your last Christmas with Diane Keaton?

Nestled between Love Actually (2003) and The Holiday (2006), The Family Stone arrived in the age where holiday-themed romantic comedies could reliably fetch reasonable budgets, famous casts, and wide theatrical releases. Bezucha apologizes to anyone who wandered into the cinema on Christmas expecting a rollicking comedy only to be confronted with a tearjerker. “It was a bait and switch, for sure,” he says of the film’s marketing. “I have definitely heard stories about people who lost people or were in the throes of things and saw that movie. So I’m sorry if we tricked anybody, but it was with the best of intentions.”

Diane Keaton, Ty Giordano, Claire Danes, Craig T. Nelson, and Dermot Mulroney in The Family Stone (2005).20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.

Keaton’s death at age 79 in October coinciding with The Family Stone turning 20 adds a meta layer to the heartache. “This caught us all by surprise, like everybody,” Bezucha says. “And so much of the story of the sequel is about her absence, so it was just a real punch.” He has been quietly working on a follow-up for the last two years, following a post-Christmas lunch Bezucha had with Mulroney in New York. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘We have to do a sequel.’ I remember thinking, ‘Why do I keep saying no?’” Bezucha recalls. “I have to deliver on the script, but in theory, everybody is like, ‘Tell me when and where and I’ll be there.’”

The original movie opens on a severe chignon hairstyle belonging to Meredith, a big-city business executive with a BlackBerry phone where her heart should be. Like many Hallmark Christmas heroines before and after, she is meant to be charmed by the idiosyncrasies of her boyfriend’s warmly dysfunctional family. But unlike those traditional-values-laden movies, The Family Stone’s leading lady is alienated for her perceived coldness, but also her conservatism. When Meredith refuses to share a bed with Everett in his childhood bedroom, Keaton’s Sybil scoffs, “So, what you’re saying is that you just don’t screw?”

Sarah Jessica Parker and Dermot Mulroney in The Family Stone (2005)20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.

Eldest son Everett returns to the Stone compound a reformed bohemian—“Would you take that goddamn tie off?” Sybil taunts at one point—a stark contrast to his four siblings, including Luke Wilson as perpetually stoned Berkeley-based documentary film editor Ben, and Rachel McAdams as NPR-totebag-carrying teacher Amy. The New York Times scoffed at the latter, labeling it “a red flag for intolerance, if ever there was one” in its review. But the pièce de résistance in liberal-coded characters has got to be Everett’s brother Thad (Ty Giordano), a gay, deaf architect in a relationship with a Black man named Patrick (Brian J. White)—none of which is a point of contention in his nonconformist family. But Bezucha didn’t dwell on the inclusion of such diverse characters, having the entire family communicate in sign language throughout the film as means of further isolating Meredith from their ranks: “Literally, there is a language they are speaking that she cannot access.”

Studio champions like then Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Tom Rothman, producer Michael London, and then head of Fox 2000, Elizabeth Gabler, the project’s “fairy godmother,” says Bezucha “really embraced this oddball family that is a little politically prickly.” Perhaps because Bezucha infused bits of his own upbringing in an East Coast academic family into the Stones. “Diane owes a lot to a woman I knew named Sybil Wise, but also a lot to my mother’s mother. Luke is my Uncle Douglas in spades. Amy’s a little angry; people recognize my sister from a time in her life, but I think there are worse things than having Rachel McAdams play you,” he says. Even some of The Family Stone’s vocal critics have a soft spot for the petulant Amy. “You just know in a snapshot who that girl is,” says the filmmaker, “with the Blundstones and tights and vintage skirt and trucker T-shirt underneath her sweater. The laundry basket. And the Volvo that you know was handed down from her parents.” As for Bezucha, who shows up for our chat in a crisp black turtleneck and cops to having a throat-clearing tic: “I’m a weird combination of Everett and Meredith, I imagine.”

The Stone family’s political views are heavily implied, but never stated outright. “There’s no political party identified in the movie. Politics don’t come up,” Bezucha says. “It’s just race and sexual orientation and all those cute things.” If the movie were released today, he ventures there’d be more pressure to spell out a character’s ideology. “Look, I can’t believe they ever made it,” he adds with a laugh. “I don’t think a studio would comfortably make this now. It would be encouraged to either push one direction or the other. These are strange times. You just want everyone to be a little more generous to each other.”

There is little room for goodwill from the Stones, particularly after a cringeworthy game of charades where Amy accuses Meredith of pointing to Patrick (Brian J. White), the one Black person in the room, when acting out a clue for The Bride Wore Black. “Everyone says that she’s conservative, but she’s just uptight. I don’t know who she voted for,” says Bezucha. “She appears rigid because she doesn’t want to make a mistake, not because she doesn’t like people. It’s just tribalism. There’s an interloper who they sense is vulnerable and they, like Jackals, go after her.”

Sarah Jessica Parker in The Family Stone (2025).20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.

Family game night is an icy prelude to the nauseating main course. As tensions rise, Meredith calls in her sister, Julie (Claire Danes), for backup. While eating dinner with the Stone family, Meredith questions Thad and Patrick about their plans to adopt, awkwardly inquiring about their race and sexual orientation preferences. When Sybil quips that she wished all her boys would be gay so they’d never leave her, Meredith cluelessly replies, “You didn’t really hope for gay children, did you?”

Sybil and the rest of her brood turn on Meredith, who flees from the house in distress. “Her wording and approach are unfortunate, but she really is talking about not wanting a child to have a hard time,” Bezucha says. And as word spreads about Sybil’s declining health, Meredith proves an easy punching bag. “Everybody’s super sensitive because they sense, in one way or another, this is her last Christmas,” he continues. “For me, what they choose to perceive as an attack on gay people is actually an attack on their mother’s values. But that sort of overexplains everything, doesn’t it?” Bezucha adds with a grin.

Back at the Christmas Eve dinner from hell, with everyone still sitting at the table, Sybil gets a dejected Thad’s attention by throwing a fork in his direction, speaking and signing, “Hey, you. I love you. And you are more normal than any other asshole sitting at this table. OK?” That touching moment, performed with arresting sincerity by Keaton, has resonated beyond Bezucha’s wildest dreams. “Nobody knew when we were making it that it would have longevity,” he says. “I loved getting calls from Diane: ‘Oh my God, I was just in the store and this woman came up to me.’ She got a lot of response from the LGBTQ community for being a real ally. I had not anticipated that exchange would be as meaningful to people as it was.”

Bezucha recalls zero resistance to the scene’s uncomfortable subject matter, recalling far more debate over how much of Sybil’s double mastectomy scars to show during an intimate scene involving her husband, Kelly (played by Craig T. Nelson). But he isn’t surprised that few holiday films since have bothered to get even mildly political. “When you try to please everybody, to make something for as wide an audience as possible, some of those [movies] just feel like holiday wallpaper,” says Bezucha. “We didn’t do that.” Further proof: the predictably divisive brother-swapping maneuver in which Everett falls for Meredith’s sister, Julie, and Meredith finds love with her ex-boyfriend’s brother Ben. Not every audience member was on board. “Oh, yeah. They love it,” Bezucha retorts. “Doesn’t feel weird at all!”

Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson in The Family Stone (2005).20th Century Fox/Everett Collection.

A more generous read is that both Meredith and Julie, as well as the Christmas morning arrival of Amy’s former lover Brad (Paul Schneider), are three final pieces to a familial puzzle that Sybil assembles just in time for her last Christmas. Even Meredith makes nice with the family, giving each member a framed black-and-white photo of Sybil pregnant with Amy that moves them for reasons she can’t comprehend. That prop now sits in Bezucha’s home—a reminder of the movie, but also of his good friend Diane. “She was a buddy,” he says. “We would go see movies together and drink wine.”

The Family Stone factored into many Keaton tributes after her October passing, proof of its lasting place in the late actor’s legacy. “It wipes me out. I grew up watching Annie Hall, Manhattan. She’s spectacular in Reds,” says Bezucha. “She often said she wasn’t an actor, but a personality, and that’s total bullshit.” He pauses. “It’s just inconceivable that I got to meet her in the first place. You’re lucky if you see a shooting star, and I feel like I got hit by a comet.”

Keaton’s presence will linger over the Family Stone follow-up, which is set 20 years after the original and features the entire main cast: “Anybody you met in the first movie is in the second one.” Back in 2005, a genre-agnostic film with a dying mother and hot-button social issues could earn almost $93 million worldwide on an $18 million budget. Today, the road to a wide theatrical release will be rockier, but Bezucha is hopeful that movie studios are down to get weird once more. “Everything is scrutinized in a way it perhaps wasn’t then. It feels like there’s less good faith out there,” says Bezucha. Quoting his character Ben, he adds, “But everybody’s got a freak flag.”

Bezucha is tight-lipped about the sequel’s plot—“You’ll be surprised on Christmas morning,” he says, instead sharing the song he’s been listening to while writing the script: Jefferson Starship’s 1981 track “Find Your Way Back.” The rock band sings, “You know, it’s been a long, long road / Since I packed up and left on my own / And I carry a heavy load / Just trying to get back to her heart,” lyrics that serve as a mission statement for recapturing the offbeat magic of the first movie, but also feel all too fitting for the world’s first Christmas without Diane Keaton.