The Guilt Trip (2012)

(In French, On TV, August 2022) Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand make for a weird pairing, but that’s exactly what The Guilt Trip is built on—cramming both actors in the confines of a tiny rental car for a cross-country trip. There’s a bit of narrative scaffolding involving Rogen’s character pitching a new kind of cleaning product to mega-retailers (most of them mentioned by their instantly recognizable names), but really that’s just an excuse for a milquetoast mother/son bonding narrative through various adventures and overly-long episodic set-pieces. It’s watchable without being particularly involving—you can recognize how The Guilt Trip sets up those deep personal arcs, but caring about them is another matter entirely. It’s clearly more fun to watch both lead actors in their moment-to-moment interactions, playing off the clash of generations (even if there’s forty years between them—Streisand clearly playing younger than her age) with a light side order of snob/slob conflict. It’s not funny as much as it’s familiar—you can see the jokes coming from a state away, and the film’s tendency to lengthen its episodes for no good purpose doesn’t help. I suppose it’s fun to see Streisand come out of semi-retirement to grace audiences with another lead performance (and the film isn’t quite as heavy on her prima donna quirks) but the result is hardly something that only she could have played. I suppose that The Guilt Trip does hit its target, though—the ideal public is halfway between Rogen and Streisand, which is admittedly an unusual mid-point but one that goes for comfort and mild gags more than anything overly outrageous or sophisticated.