Streisand plays Joyce, a widow whose son Andy lives far away in California, having attended UCLA to become an environmental scientist. Andy has invented an e-friendly cleaning product and he is making the rounds to companies like Kmart and Costco with the hopes that they will pick it up and sell it in mass quantities. He stops off at his mother’s and decides that it would be a good idea for her to drive across country with him as he pursues this dream. She briefly ponders how going would mess up her routine (book club, friendship/therapy sessions with Gayle, played by Kathy Najimy, and the hassle of holding her mail) and decides to go. Andy has a secret motive to inviting his mother: she tells him about her first love, whom he looks up on the internet and discovers is living in San Francisco, so he thinks he should finagle his mother’s reunion with this long ago love, without her knowledge.
Mom is pushy and bossy on this trip, including insisting they get an economy sized car. Streisand plays the Jewish mother to the hilt, and she seems as if she’s never really lost that nasal accent in real life. They stop at a strip club in a snow storm, a famous steak restaurant in Texas, the Grand Canyon for a split second, and ultimately Vegas. Joyce gets drunk and has a good time, which she has obviously been missing. Business isn’t going well for Andy, and his mother’s meddling isn’t helping. The plot veers off to more serious issues, such as why Andy isn’t married and having a family of his own — could it be that mom smothered him growing up? Could his first love be the issue? But they don’t feel quite “real,” and either Rogen doesn’t have the dramatic chops to pull off the more serious scenes, or they were just not well-written.
Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen in “The Guilt Trip.”
Parts of the movie lagged a little bit — a road movie tends to focus on two characters almost exclusively, and that can get old. Brett Cullen makes a sexy appearance as a cowboy who finds Joyce attractive, especially because she has the guts to give a steak challenge (eating four pounds of steak and all the fixings in one hour) a shot. But that story line has been done by John Candy in The Great Outdoors. There are some fun scenes and nice touches — the most notable being when Andy finally takes charge while doing a demonstration at a QVC-esque studio. Another good note is that Joyce brings a book on CD to listen to, and it’s the wonderful novel Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides — a fascinating story you might not want to listen to with your mother. But others are just weird. Streisand is 70 (albeit pretty well-preserved, surgically and otherwise) and Rogen is 30 and there are a few age references that just don’t add up. It’s distracting and strange. Joyce comments that she last saw her first love when she was 21, and has wondered about him “for almost 30 years,” which puts Joyce in her early fifties. Several references don’t add up in this movie, which tends to show that the script was not generated with care.
The Guilt Trip is fun at points, but it is completely forgettable. It isn’t going to hit the list of movies to see this holiday season. In the land of Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook, it is more akin to another Meet the Fockers, but probably not as funny.
