22 January 2013
Directed by: Anne Fletcher
Starring: Barbra Striesand, Seth Rogen, Julene Renee-Preciado and John Hurt
What It’s About: A man goes on a road trip with his estranged mother and hilarity ensues.
Rated PG-13 (for language and some risque material)
Runtime: 95 minutes
By Joann Lee, Staff Writer
Seth Rogen and Barbara Streisand teamed up their comedic and acting abilities in their recent movie, The Guilt Trip. The main character, Andy Brewster (Rogen), is an inventor who has spent the last few years making an organic cleaning product. He sets out on a cross-country road trip in order to pitch his new product, but not without visiting his widowed mother, Joyce Brewster (Streisand), in New Jersey first. After a few unrealistic turns of events and scenes of banter, Andy discovers his mother has an old flame who lives in San Francisco. Through a couple of remarkable Bing searches, Andy finds the man’s home address and invites his mother with him on the business/road trip in hopes of reuniting them.
The movie is sentimental and heartwarming and features a unique type of humor that the crudely hilarious Rogen isn’t usually known for doing. Dotted with all sorts of embarrassing mother moments, the scenes with Streisand remind you of your own mother and all the slightly mortifying things she does. Streisand plays the perfect and oh-so-relatable mother figure in all her affectionate glory. Rogen also portrays the embarrassed son quite convincingly, causing all the sons and daughters in the audience to sympathize with him while Streisand attempts to fix his hair with saliva instead of hair gel. The movie as a whole has a light-hearted sense of humor that is not common in the playfully inappropriate movies that are popular today. WatchingThe Guilt Trip’s plot unfold is like watching one of those aforementioned inappropriate movies with your mother: awkward and entertaining, with plenty of eye-rolling and embarrassed wincing. No matter where the scene takes place, whether it is in a strip club or an upscale company office, the congenial commentary that Streisand’s character provides makes every bit of the movie fondly sentimental. The only problem I had with the movie was that there was no substantial plot. The entire movie is one big road trip that is mostly predictable. Still, it’s a cute movie to watch with your own mother.
7/10
By Misha Perinova, Staff Writer
If you drive 3,000 miles from New Jersey, it will take you about eight days to reach San Francisco. If you drive with only your mom for company, you may not make it that far. A few hours into a cross-country trip with his mother, Andrew Brewster (Seth Rogen) begins to have such doubts.
Opening with a voiceover of missed calls, the film quickly establishes the strained relationship between Andrew (“Andy”) and his overbearing mother Joyce (Barbara Streisand). Andy, an organic chemist, has spent the past five years developing a quality organic cleaning product but has not yet succeeded in marketing it. Currently unemployed and with his bank account running dry, Andy embarks on a road trip in a final attempt to market his product to corporate retailers. This last-ditch effort kicks off at his mother’s home in New Jersey, where Andy plans to rest up for the long road ahead. However, one emotionally heavy conversation with his mother changes the course of Andy’s plans. After prying incessantly into Andy’s love life, his mother reveals something about her own: even though she marries Andy’s father, she never stopped loving a man she met in Florida. Intrigued, Andy sees an opportunity get his mother off his back. After tracking the man down to his current residence in San Francisco, he decides to take his mother down to the city by the bay to help her reconnect with her lost love.
Inspired by screen writer Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love)’s real-life trip with his own mother, this misadventure centers on the mother-son dynamic. The storyline of this relationship is very cliché; the clashes between Andy and his overbearing mother can be seen from a mile away and their eventual friendship is blandly predictable. However, Streisand and Rogen share enough chemistry to capture the audience (which is fortunate, as there are few supporting actors) and deliver their lines quite comically, providing viewers with relief from the flat plotline. The first half of the film is slow to pick up, but by the second half—when the audience is fully acquainted with Andy and Joyce and their banter—it gains enough momentum to sustain viewers until the credits start rolling.
Typical of director Anne Fletcher’s “feel-good” movies (27 Dresses, The Proposal), The Guilt Trip seeks to establish themes of love and friendship. Unfortunately, it moves too quickly from scene to scene to actually develop any solid ideas. Yet in spite of the swift scene changes, the mother-son relationship is explored enough to create several touching moments and many fun ones. Streisand die-hards will be pleased by her strong (and quirky) performance, which often takes center-stage. For fans of Rogen though, the film may be a bit underwhelming because Rogen, without his characteristic improvisational banter, shows more restraint than in previous films.
While the film sporadically falls flat throughout its hour-and-a-half running time, its scenes do have a lot of heart and quite a few laughs. At the end of the road, Andy and Joyce find (ever so predictably) that they have more in common than they once thought, leaving audiences, if not surprised or satisfied, pleasantly optimistic about their own relationships.
So, to all the dysfunctional families considering paying the ridiculously high prices for counseling: put away your checkbooks. A family road trip may be all the therapy you need.
7/10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXu3nfQ5qTE
Courtesy of collider.com