This holiday season, when you care enough to do the very least, why not start with an e-card, then invite your liked ones over for a meal of Dinty Moore and egg noodles. Conclude by taking everyone out to see an aggressively average movie like “The Guilt Trip.”
Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand star as a cringing son and nagging mom driving across a large country in a small car. It’s a one-joke movie, if “Jewish mothers are annoying” is a joke. But just as a film about boredom should not actually be boring, no movie should credibly simulate the experience of being stuck in a car with Barbra Streisand for eight days. Not unless it’s being billed as “a spine-tingling tale of modern horror.”
The pretext for the excursion is thin bordering on bulimic. Andy (Rogen) is visiting home in New Jersey from LA, where he has invented an organic cleaning liquid that he is pitching to various national retailers on a single trip. He learns that his widowed mom, Joyce (Streisand), who greets him at the airport with the line “All grown up and wearing a sports jacket!” still has a crush on the boy — also named Andy! — she dated before she met his father.
A bit of Googling reveals that the ex-boyfriend now works in San Francisco, so naturally the son who was named after him invites Mom on the trip with plans to show up unannounced on the doorstep of the older man, even though he dumped her all those years ago. Right.
Cue embarrassing automotive breakdowns, embarrassing Mom-requested visits to old girlfriends, a steak-eating contest in Texas, lines like “You can take one of my books in the bathroom if you have to make” and a stop at a topless joint: “Does that say tapas? I love tapas.” I hear your groans, my friends, but they’re no louder than my own.
I expected better from screenwriter Dan Fogelman, who did the sprightly and original “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” but the bigger surprise is that a talent like Rogen would consent to be reduced to the straight man in this vaudeville act. Rogen started off by giving every sign that he wanted to do interesting work, dollars be damned, but . . . earlier this year he co-wrote the abysmal alien-invasion comedy “The Watch” and now this. I guess most comics turn lame in the end, but 30 seems awfully young to give up. (Incidentally, if Mom dated the other Andy at age “19 or 20,” then quickly moved on to another man and immediately got pregnant with Andy, I guess that means Streisand is only about 52. How odd that she looks 70.)
Despite dull direction by chick-flick specialist Anne Fletcher (when there’s a shot of the car heading right and Andy is protesting that they’re going in the wrong direction, it’s obvious that the next shot will be of the car heading left), “The Guilt Trip” isn’t a total loss. After a while, Andy stops simply blanching at Mom’s inappropriateness (calling Asians “Orientals” or telling how his penis once turned purple) and starts firing back with his own one-liners, which sound like Rogen wrote them.
Andy has a triumphant moment of his own when he gets to hawk his wares on the Home Shopping Network in a scene that yielded, for me, the only big laugh of the movie. The rest isn’t exactly funny, but those who haven’t much kept up with comedy developments in the past 30 years — like your mom — might mistake it for entertainment. On the other hand, wouldn’t she think you were maybe trying to tell her something about her nagging? Maybe you’d never hear the end of it. Best not to risk it.