The future writer and director of The Family Stone was a student at New York's Parsons School of Design when he had one of those little epiphanies that make it into a movie script, a unique touch that gives a film a special zing.

"I used to see these packs of deaf kids -- there was a high school for the deaf nearby -- down on the subway platform, fighting, flirting, joking, arguing, whatever they were doing, in silence," says Thomas Bezucha. "I was just enthralled by this silent culture going on right in the middle of all this noise, the din of the city.

So when he started putting together The Family Stone, a movie about a loud, open-hearted and liberal New England clan that opened this month, he thought he would make one character deaf. And he'd have the whole family know sign language.

When the Stones argue, insult, charm or console, they translate what they're saying into American Sign Language so that no one, including the gay and deaf son and sibling Thad (Ty Giordano), is left out of the fun.

"I'm trying to tickle something about inclusiveness," says Bezucha. "This is an inclusive family. And this woman that their son [Dermot Mulroney] has brought home for the holidays isn't like that. I'm seriously stacking the deck against Meredith [Sarah Jessica Parker] so that you see her as meaner, smaller-minded than she is.

It's not the main plot line of The Family Stone. Most of the scenes aren't "translated" into American Sign Language on the spot by the different actors because Giordano isn't in most scenes. But it's a little movie shorthand that, like a daughter's NPR totebag or the mother's (Diane Keaton) irritated tolerance of pot use by another son (Luke Wilson), says volumes about the film's title family. Thad isn't just deaf or gay. He's both. And he's accepted.

"The fact that in the movie the parents decided to use sign language says a lot," says Jessica Collins, a sign language interpreter for Orange County Public Schools and the University of Central Florida. "They accepted their son and his deafness. They didn't try to fix it."

That's a big deal, says Debbie Drobney, an American Sign Language professor at Valencia Community College and adjunct professor at the University of Central Florida. "Only 3 percent of hearing families will learn Sign to communicate with their deaf children."

Those families may be in denial over the child's deafness, holding out hope for a cure. They may not want to put in the years it takes to learn ASL, pushing the child toward the less-inclusive lip reading and spoken language taught by speech therapy ("oralism"). Conversely, while American Sign Language may offer more thorough communication, it is used by no more than 2 million people in the United States, a tiny fraction of the population.

Sign language has turned up in a few movies this year. It was a funny punch line in Madagascar, as a sign language-speaking monkey is translated by a speaking monkey who answers questions such as "Of course we're going to throw poo at them" and who reads the labels on the crates that tell the disaffected animals where they're being sent -- Africa.

One of the lives in the multistory drama Nine Lives is that of a woman (Amy Brenneman) whose deaf ex-husband (William Fichtner) never got over how great the sex was in that marriage. He proceeds to tell her, passionately and colorfully, in sign language -- at the funeral of his second wife.

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