The Family Stone is as stuffed with beguiling performances -- some of them unexpectedly good -- as its script is overstuffed. And though even the beguiled may feel manipulated the next morning (or when hitting the exits), the players put it over by a nose. Happy holidays.

Plunked from an intended earlier opening date into today's warm and fuzzy mid-December slot (a sign of studio confidence), this is the seasonal family comedy that emerges at the end of every year, the kind that's safe for Grandma. You sense this in the coming attractions when an uptight Sarah Jessica Parker falls in some kitchen-floor goop. Primitive chuckle, anyone?

Of course, you wouldn't know from the same ads that fatal illness is a key plot component, that one of the family's five siblings is deaf and gay and wants to adopt, or that a seemingly straight-arrow dad likes funny stuff in his brownies. You can argue over whether these issues add depth to, or distract from, the more conventionally comic romantic entanglements that are the source of some solid laughs. But this is one busy wannabe heart-tugger.

The scorecard, and you need one, goes like this. Dermot Mulroney (his best performance ever) is an overachieving elder son in a miscast courtship with neurotically edgy Parker (never better). Younger sisters are married and pregnant Elizabeth Reaser and snooty cutie Rachel McAdams. Brothers are hearing-impaired Ty Giordano and a frequently stoned, what-me-worry-ish Luke Wilson (never better).