The Guilt Trip

   

     Whenever I think about a road trip movie, I always picture a group of teenagers or a family traveling in a green station wagon. I think I just covered eighty five percent of every road trip movie ever made with that sentence. The one thing every one of those movies has in common with each other is that the road trip is the perfect bonding experience, and the cause of great comic hijinks. I can think of a lot of road trips I would love to take, but the one that would maybe be the least appealing, would be a week on the road with just me and my mother. Well that is exactly what “The Guilt Trip” is all about.

    Andy (Seth Rogen) is an inventor of an all organic cleaner. He is trying his best to sell his product to a store with an old fashion door to door routine. Andy’s mother Joyce (Barbra Streisand) is one of those mothers that always want to make sure her son is taken care of. You know the type, calling numerous times to make sure you are doing something; you know just being a mother. Andy returns home for a few days before he embarks on a cross country trip to sell his product. After hearing a story from his mother, Andy adds a stop and invites her to come along with him for the ride. Joyce is good at a few things, saving money, which she shows when she talks Andy into renting an economy car and of course being overly motherly. What transpires next is Streisand eating half a cow, every road trip’s favorite stop at the Grand Canyon and of course a stop in Vegas, where Joyce discovers piercings. When it is all done, both Joyce and Andy have discovered something they didn’t know about each other.

   I have to admit the mother/son road trip didn’t sound to appealing when I first heard about it. The addition of Rogen and writer Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love) did make it sound a lot better. What I learned is something I have learned many times before, never judge a movie by its premise. This is a very fun road trip movie, the kind you could take your mother to (no pun intended). It’s got the humor that a mother could really appreciate (ok no more bad mother jokes). What is great about this movie is how great Rogen and Streisand are together, they are so good in fact you might leave the movie asking yourself, are they really mother and son? There are plenty of moments that will make you laugh and just enough moments to feel Rogen’s character’s pain. This movie has me wanting to plan a road trip with my mother, just to see if it would be as much fun as this movie. I cannot say this about most films, but this is one movie that is more than your mother will love.

 Brian Taylor