It takes a while to realize that Meredith, the goal-oriented, perfectly-dressed Manhattanite that Sarah Jessica Parker plays in The Family Stone, is a different characterization from Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw, the materialistic sybarite of HBO’s “Sex and the City”. Parker’s sensitive girly-girl specialty (which originated with her first TV series “Square Pegs”), has never been wound so up-tightly. Meredith is a chic, modern prig. Her haughtiness (including a throat-clearing neurotic tic) is transparently defensive. When invited to spend Christmas with her fiancee’s New England family, all her thin-skinned mannerisms get a good workout. From first sight of Meredith, the Stones target her for ridicule—she’s a perfect bourgie fool—but there’s a trick: Their vilification backfires.

The Family Stone’s real target is the stone-throwers’ own glass house. Director-writer Thomas Bezucha has laid out an unconventional farce that contains domestic political critique—that is, a highly original and painful reconstitution of the familial ideal.

But don’t misread The Family Stone as simply a red state attack on blue state America. It’s the Stones who are politically correct liberals and though their hostility to Meredith (pointing out and exaggerating her conservatism) is funny, it’s also cruel. Bezucha knows that’s the way liberals can be. (“The left are really great haters,” Pauline Kael wrote when taking exception to Mike Leigh’s class comedy High Hopes.) Although Meredith’s prissiness may deserve a little derision, she’s merely a fledgling version of the obnoxiousness that the Stone family has mastered. (When Meredith says “I don’t care what you think.” A grinning Stone answers, “Yes, you do.”) Meredith would like to join the Stones with their Waspy class confidence, but she is an unnerving reflection of what the Stone family doesn’t like in itself: insecurity.

Diane Keaton plays Sybil, the mesmerizing yet startlingly blunt post-feminist matriarch, who has raised her brood liberally—with frank obscenities, cliquish insularity and fierce protectiveness. Craig T. Nelson plays the complacent father Kelly and each sibling embodies various provincial vanities: Sarcastic Amy (Rachel McAdams) judges by looks first, pregnant Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) is abundantly preoccupied, Ben (Luke Wilson) cruises on his easy-going charm, oldest brother Everett (Dermot Mulroney) angles for approval and the youngest brother Thad (Ty Giordano) is deaf, gay and the family favorite. He brings home his welcomed partner Patrick (Brian White), a demonstration of the Stone’s proud tolerance.

Beneath the cozy image of domestic warmth, each Stone reveals an idiosyncrasy, dark or just odd. Their desperation for love—and love’s difficult fulfillment—comes through in the enmity that Meredith provokes. Bezucha uses Meredith’s careerism as a comic foil. Through her mistreatment, he scrutinizes the pattern of selfishness that has set-in in contemporary American behavior. Under the guise of a Christmas holiday flick, The Family Stone’s comedy-of-manners charts the confused new way that people sort out their virtues. The opening credit sequence of traditional bucolic Christmas cards works the same way as the valentines in the Coen Brothers’ largely misunderstood Intolerable Cruelty; these cards bid farewell to the way families used to be idealized.

Both Bezucha and Parker must appreciate that young women like Meredith have not found their place between old values and new sophistications. They are not models to emulate; they are—like their prototype Sybil—to be pitied. And because The Family Stone does not stint from making Meredith pitiable (only a cold, hungry puppy can look more downhearted than Parker turning on the pathos) this is a richer family film than Meet the Parents and its facile offshoots.

Carrie Bradshaw was TV’s ultimate consumer and sex kitten (an idol for capitalist porn) but Meredith’s ambitions toward love and class are so credible that after laughing at her—nervously—you may cry sincerely. Bezucha takes the emotional root of Meredith’s ambition and puts it in the light of the Stones’ disapproving, insular behavior. It’s a rare demonstration of people being insensitive in their righteousness. (“I know you’re disappointed, but think about how I feel,” Sybil tells Everett, breaking the news of Meredith’s unsuitability.) Bezucha looks beyond the Stones’ smart-folks’ politesse and sees a set of problems alarmingly similar to Meredith’s. They all become a mirror to our Bush era antagonisms; a family portrait that reflects back everyone’s scared tendency to be supercilious.

When Thad is around, the Stones use sign language—to better ostracize Meredith while enjoying the in-jokes and private codes that families take pride in. This incestuous badinage is a fact of family life rarely shown on screen; the last time was the 1991 classic Crooked Hearts where a family imploded of its own claustrophobic rituals and secrets. There were moments of aching intimacy in Crooked Hearts (such as a physical fight between brothers that turned tenderly forgiving) that I’ll never forget; quotidian American scenes took on Ingmar Bergman intensity. But though The Family Stone’s style is farce, it becomes similarly moving.

Bezucha works through the comic premise of foolish characters unable to accept others without judgment, and gets at something profound. When Meredith calls her sister for back up, the arrival of Julie (Claire Danes) presents new conflicts. These sisters’ rivalry, though not fully dramatized, shifts the film into mixed-up alliances and comical romantic fate. (It’s worth a dozen pairs of In Her Shoes.) Yet Bezucha highlights common family anxieties and the assorted, panicky ways that people seek acceptance.   

Despite awkward shifts of tone in Bezucha’s emotional balancing act, he makes up for his flaws whenever he looks into Meredith’s and the Stones’ crooked hearts. In one such sequence Susannah, the film’s quietest character, sits alone at night to watch Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. (“This is my favorite part.”) Images of Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” are juxtaposed with a montage of each character isolated with their dashed or unexpected hopes. Garland’s plaintive, beseeching voice underscores Bezucha’s vision.

Understand: This is a great moment because it’s not ironic. It’s felt. The same way Vincente Minnelli felt it and meant it 61 years ago only, now, in modern terms—challenging the antipathy and unease that fills the Stone household. The pixilated TV distortion of Garland’s cartoon-vivid face looms ghost-like, an unreachable idealization of what family life should be, poignantly played against Stone hard reality. It compares to the magnificent “Tammy” sequence in Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes.

And there’s more. Before romantic slapstick chaos leaves the family bruised, exhausted yet slowly healing, Bezucha achieves moments of desperate revelation more beautiful than you expect. In one, Ben tells Meredith his dream (“You were shoveling snow...”) In another, Meredith finally protests her mistreatment and her outcry is so unabashed it galvanizes the movie. Meredith’s plea pushes the film’s sit-com premise to the furthest edge. Parker’s wail contains the bitterest dregs of sorrow. And in this context, it has the force of Moliere.

Bezucha and Parker accomplish what “Sex in the City” never did; they glimpse the everyday tragedy of people caught up in social and family competition. And they make you feel it. This intelligently sentimental Christmas movie manages the miracle of never being cynical.