Movie Review: ‘The Guilt Trip,’ With Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
The guilt that Ms. Streisand’s character, Joyce Brewster, lays on her grown son, Andy (Mr. Rogen), a struggling inventor, is larded with enough sweetness and awareness of appropriate boundaries that its humor caresses rather than stings. Joyce’s complaints mostly have to do with Andy’s decision to live 3,000 miles away from her in Los Angeles. When his mother becomes overbearing, Andy, sucking in his lower lip, politely silences her. Joyce, even at her most psychologically invasive, never whines or raises her voice.

Directed by Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal,” “27 Dresses”) from a pallid screenplay by Dan Fogelman (“Crazy, Stupid, Love”), “The Guilt Trip” is so comfy cozy that mothers and their grown children can watch it together without squirming. Even Joyce’s recollection of the time Andy’s penis turned purple is a zany throwaway remark delivered without a trace of Freudian insinuation.

What could have been a cutting satirical farce about domineering mothers and emasculated sons is a mildly funny, feel-good love story in which Mom’s sensible advice helps turn around her nerdy son’s foundering career. Although the main characters are softened Jewish stereotypes, there is no mention of religion.

Andy, who studied organic chemistry at U.C.L.A., is traveling around the country pitching an organic cleaning product he invented that consists of coconut and palm-kernel oils, and soy. You can even drink it. But his presentations are so stiff and jargony that potential backers nod off while he is talking.

When Andy makes a rare visit to see Joyce in New Jersey, he and his mother begin reminiscing. Joyce remembers her first boyfriend before she married Andy’s father, who died when Andy was 8. She has since had no love life.

Andy, sleuthing on the Internet, discovers an unmarried corporate executive living in San Francisco who has the same name as that boyfriend. He invites his mother to join him on his eight-day cross-country return trip without telling her of his plan to look up her first love at the end of the journey. Joyce, not knowing his agenda, jumps at the opportunity to be with her only child for several days.

One bland running joke is Joyce’s obsessive thrift. She insists that they rent a subcompact car instead of an S.U.V., a decision he regrets when they find themselves sandwiched between trucks in an Arkansas blizzard. Joyce also insists that they share the same room in motels and disturbs him with her habit of crunching handfuls of M&Ms while in bed. Since Ms. Streisand, now 70, looks 20 years younger, it is not implausible when one leering motel clerk mistakes them for lovers. But the movie makes little of the confusion.

Joyce is frisky and game for adventure, and in a Lubbock, Tex., steakhouse she agrees to play beat the clock while consuming a 50-ounce steak. This challenge, which could have been milked for farce, is another missed comic opportunity in a movie so timid it seems afraid of its own shadow. The chief pleasures of this mild-mannered dud lie in watching two resourceful comic actors go through their paces like the pros they are.

“The Guilt Trip” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has mild innuendo and some strong language.

The Guilt Trip

Opens on Wednesday nationwide.

Directed by Anne Fletcher; written by Dan Fogelman; director of photography, Oliver Stapleton; edited by Dana E. Glauberman and Priscilla Nedd-Friendly; music by Christophe Beck; production design by Nelson Coates; costumes by Danny Glicker; produced by Lorne Michaels, John Goldwyn and Evan Goldberg; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

WITH: Seth Rogen (Andy Brewster), Barbra Streisand (Joyce Brewster), Kathy Najimy (Gail), Yvonne Strahovski (Jessica) and Colin Hanks (Nick).

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