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In What's Up, Doc?, Barbra Streisand jokes to Love Story star Ryan O'Neal, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." In The Guilt Trip, love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes.
It's always tough to be a longtime fan of an artist and to suddenly realize that you no longer live in their target audience. Remember when you went to see Tori Amos for the eighth time and you looked around the audience and realized that you were surrounded by 14-year-old girls eyeing you suspiciously? Or the time you slept on the sidewalk to get tickets to Rent on Broadway and threw your back out trying to stand up the next morning?
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Seeing The Guilt Trip is pretty much the same experience. Trumpeted as boasting actress, musical powerhouse and Alpha Gay Icon Barbra Streisand's first starring role since the Clinton administration, the movie is both a welcome return to the spotlight for a true comedic legend and a sobering testament to the way that time changes all of us.
Because while doting mothers everywhere are going to flock to the film in droves and enjoy every last minute of its gentle, corny brand of yenta porn (seriously - this is straight-up S&M with apron strings), there's not much there for the rest of us to enjoy. And yet your mom will probably want you to go see The Guilt Trip with her over the holidays - making it one of the first film titles ever to presciently describe both the film itself and the experience of actually watching it.
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Trip's setup is simple: a browbeaten man (Seth Rogen) takes his overbearing, widowed mother (Streisand) with him on a cross-country business trip from Jersey to California despite the fact that she infantilizes him, meddles in his affairs, and generally annoys the hell out of him. He does this both because he believes that he can reconnect her with an old flame and because, being her son, he has been programmed to make himself miserable.
Along the way, mom does all kinds of mildly annoying and patently uncinematic things (using coupons! loudly chewing M&Ms! showing affection!) and it eventually leads son to drive them both off a cliff into the Grand Canyon, which is captured in triumphant freeze-frame as the film's closing image.
Okay, maybe not that last part - but it's what I was openly wishing would happen by the time they made it to Pennsylvania.
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Trip is a master class in softball comedy: it's never legitimately funny, but since it never actually tries very hard with any of its gags, it technically can't be considered a failure. Thanks to its 90 minutes of hedged comedic bets, it's precisely as moving and as disposable as a Shoebox greeting. Or as familiar and as exciting as performance fleece (which might explain Streisand's character's obsession with The Gap). Streisand looks perfectly lovely and there are a few nice, quiet moments where a glimmer of her former star shines through - but for the most part she honestly seems just to be along for the ride. Rogen - a likeable enough actor who usually has a buoyant energy about him - looks like his put-upon, rather miserable demeanor may only be partly a performance.
Most of the film's set pieces only serve to remind us of other movies that did them better. When Streisand eats five pounds of steak in order to get her meal comped at a roadhouse (seriously?), it's a pale comparison to the raucous, stomach-turning "Old 96-er" scene in The Great Outdoors. The mother/son hotel room awkwardness could be Planes Trains and Automobiles' kindly aunt. And while the segment in Las Vegas might be aiming for The Hangover, it feels more like The Leftover.
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So if you do intend on supporting our most fabulous living icon this holiday season, pack light on expectations for this particular Trip. Maybe you'll laugh once or twice (I did once!), or maybe you'll be stoned enough on seasonal cheer to overlook the fact that the film is a seriously missed opportunity. But don't go in expecting anything remotely brassy, zany, edgy, audacious, original, camp, or irreverent - i.e., all of the things that made us fall in love with Babs in the first place. Sure, her character is perfectly believable and rather sweet despite her tendency to be a busybody, but it's more a role that whoever has been blackmailing Diane Keaton for the last 10 or so years would have high on their list of potential projects than something you'd picture for the Funny Girl herself. I'm not exactly sure what it was about the project that gave it the power to lure Streisand back to a leading role - but if it serves as a stepping stone to the much-buzzed Gypsy movie that she's reportedly got in the works, it has more than served its purpose.
In the end, I've resigned myself to the fact that this movie simply wasn't made with me in mind, and that someone somewhere is having a healthy giggle into her roll-neck sweater at what may well be the biggest-budget Hallmark Hall of Fame movie ever produced. And who are we to begrudge her that? After all, she did carry you in her womb for nine months and gave up her youth and beauty to provide a good life for you, you ungrateful little sh*t.
