The Guilt Trip

This high-concept road comedy pairs superstars Barbara Streisand and Seth Rogan as a mother and son who get on each other’s nerves but end up bonding in a deep and meaningful way as a result of a drive cross-country.  That is more plot detail than I normally reveal in these review capsules, but I’m not giving anything away that you can’t guess from the poster and title of this film. The script is by Dan Fogelman, screenwriter of 2011’s Crazy Stupid Love, and like that picture, The Guilt Trip tries to recreate the kind of hilarious yet emotionally grounded comedy that felt fresh in the ’80s but usually comes out contrived and stale in contemporary times. The bar for meaningful two-person road-trip comedies has been set very high over the last 30 years by dozens of terrific small scale pictures ranging from John Hughes’ ‘80s holiday hit Plains, Trains and Automobiles to Alexander Payne’s Oscar winning Aught indie Sideways.  The Guilt Trip is not anywhere close in caliber to those films, and doesn’t even reach the mildly comedic and emotional peaks of Crazy Stupid Love.

It is not a terrible movie, but director Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses, The Proposal) is aiming squarely for the Streisand fan base rather than the Rogan crowd, and that means she takes no chances--I can’t really see anyone under 40 getting much pleasure from this picture. For one thing, there just aren’t enough laughs, and the first half is labored and grating. The set-up is dull, and the beginning of the trip, where the big laughs should be flying fast and furious, is totally uninspired. What’s worse is that that we don’t really enjoy seeing these two big stars bickering with each other. We just watch them drive across a United States that never doesn’t look like California, and suffer through a bunch of totally non-credible sales meetings that Rogan’s character must take along the way. The film improves a bit in the second half when the predictable emotional beats begin to arrive. Though the film only serves up exactly what you expect, it becomes far less annoying once Streisand and Rogan stop getting on each other’s nerves. By the end, you do care about these characters a little, just not enough to make the picture anything more that a less than halfway decent rental for Mother’s Day.