The Guilt Trip: An Unexpectedly Semi-Amusing Ride

Director Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses, The Proposal) has done the unthinkable.  She has transformed a film whose mere premise makes skin crawl into a watchable and even mildly enjoyable experience.  While the plot is predictable and its lessons pedantic, the script nails the mother-son experience with frightening facility and the acting, somehow, brings the horror-comedy alive on screen.

Premise: A mother and son take a business trip together across the country. Result: A strikingly accurate depiction of the bizarre relationship between needy mothers and alienated sons has some good laughs and is relatively entertaining.

The premise of the film, on paper, borders on agonizingly preposterous.  Andrew Brewster (Seth Rogen), a former FDA Organic Chemist turned entrepreneur, has developed an organic cleaning solution and he plans to peddle his wares across the country to major distributers like Costco and Kmart. However before beginning his journey, he spends a weekend with his mother, an ordeal made horrifically real through an opening sequence that borders on psychotic.

Joyce Brewster (Barbra Streisand) is not merely an aging mother but somehow every nagging matriarch that has ever been, capable of super human strengths allotted only to the women who have birthed offspring: she is capable of re-dialing her son’s number and leaving countless messages faster than a speeding bullet; she can span disparate Gap locations in a single bound; and she can spot an embarrassing underwear sale from space.

And within moments of her son’s arrival, she uses each one of her precious powers with vengeance, never knowing that moment by moment she is slowly consuming his soul in the process. Quickly the guilt to seeps from her pores and a trap dinner is set with her equally squabbley pals Gayle (Kathy Najimy), Anita (Miriam Margolyes), and Diana (Rose Abdoo) who look custom made to round out the group Golden Girls costumes for Halloween.

But just as Andy and Joyce seem to be falling back into old routines, inexplicably, Joyce decides to tell him all about her first boyfriend, her long lost love, the man she actually named Andy after all those years ago.  Stricken with shock and horror, and perhaps in a moment of madness coupled with a desire to get his mother to possess a life other than his own, he decides to search for this Andrew Margolis.

Discovering that he is in San Francisco, Andy devises a plan to take his mother on his trip with him so that he can broker a surprise reunion.  The result is maternal-cataclysm.

First, Joyce’s gifts for conducting every irritating activity is a wonder and audiences will be left in shock at how closely her antics approximate reality.  And this nagging has more consequences than annoyance when she manages to somehow reunite Andy with his High School sweetheart Jessica (Yvonne Strahovski), who is now pregnant again with her husband Rob (Colin Hanks).  The situation is mortifying for all to say the least and marks the extremity to which nagging and meddling can go.

Of course, there are wins for the mother-son team including an eating contest where Joyce essentially consumes the calories that could sustain a small African village. There she meets Cowboy Ben Graw (Brett Cullen) who apparently has a fetish for women who can eat their weight in cow.

The acting in the film is one of the key pillars that make it acceptable.  Streisand channels her inner-Meet the Fockers and delivers an impressive arsenal of nag-tacular antics.  Rogan, for his end, is also quite good at appearing ever irritated and vaguely traumatized by every syllable uttered by Streisand.   Everyone else is passable ultimately not relevant.

In addition to the acting, this film works more often than it doesn’t for a very basic reason.  While the plot itself is predictable and the premise as a whole reeks of cheesy, derivative slapstick, the film establishes some very clear boundaries that it does well not to cross.  The antics that take place, despite the awkwardness they create, are all squarely within reality which helps make the nonsense digestible rather than vomit-inducing.  And the film so effectively captures the motherly naga-thon, that shocked audiences may not even notice most of the flaws.

And so, while the film is far from a masterpiece and frankly has a low re-watchability factor, it is still fun the first time around.  There will be a few laugh-out-loud moments and the characters are endearing, at least enough to keep us rooting for them throughout.  Considering what expectations were, that alone is a feat of magic.

Rating: 6 – A mediocre Prosecco that a cute bartender served you