YMMV / The Family Stone

• Ass Pull: After being treated horribly for the most of the film, Meredith is suddenly shown to have homophobic views in the dinner scene, just to justify how everyone has been treating her.
• Broken Aesop: Meredith, while uptight, spends the majority of the film being mistreated by the family, especially Amy. Then, she ends up insulting Thad for being gay during dinner, and gets told off for it. Suddenly, she is that bad after all, and the family was right all along. Basically, the moral at this point is stating that you should be allowed to mistreat/bully people you just met for having personalities different from yours because at some point, they will turn out to be jerks with unforgiveable flaws; therefore, you should be crappy towards them. This also gets undermined by the fact that Meredith ends up with Ben.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The whole family behaving horribly towards Meredith throughout most of the movie. Amy had one bad meeting with her beforehand, and she decides to basically poison the entire family against her as a result. The audience is supposed to see them as just reacting to Meredith being uptight, but it really comes off as a bullying campaign against a nervous woman who is obviously trying very hard to impress them. Special mention goes to Sybil getting annoyed that Meredith didn't want to disrespect her by having sex with her son in her home on their first night there.
  • Meredith, while Innocently Insensitive during the dinner scene, also comes off as homophobic and callous towards Thad. When they give her the chance to let the comments slide, she goes even further by implicitly saying that their gay son "isn't normal". Sybil in particular is portrayed as being in the wrong for angrily defending her son, and when Meredith breaks up with her boyfriend, it comes off less because she is fed up with how he has allowed the mistreatment she has endured to continue and more because he wouldn't defend her bigoted opinions.
• Values Dissonance: Meredith's extremely insensitive comments about "the gays" (and her decision to double down on them are regarded as homophobic in-universe, but were less of a Moral Event Horizon and more of Both Sides Have a Point in the early/mid-2000s before the advent of LGBT rights and representation in the mainstream.