"Guilt Trip" and Guilty Pleasure

Some people's guilty pleasure movies are mindless action spectaculars, idiot comedies, or fluffy romances. I indulge in all of these occasionally. My go-to guilty pleasure movies are usually kids' films, especially cartoons. However, I realized that there is another little subgenre of films that I also tend to enjoy even if they're terrible – feel-good family bonding movies, like "The Guilt Trip."

"The Guilt Trip" is a mediocre movie at best. Seth Rogen and Barbara Streisand play a mother and son pair who go on a road trip across America together, which forces them to go through various contrived trials and tribulations in order to become more appreciative of each other in the end. Rogen is Andy Brewster, an inventor who is trying to pitch a new , environmentally friendly cleaning product to several potential buyers, and has set up meetings all over the country. Before setting out on the trip, he visits his long widowed mother Joyce, played by Streisand. One thing leads to another, and Andy invites his mother to come along, in order to secretly set up a meeting between her and an old flame who lives on the opposite coast. Yeah, I mentioned the contrivances, right?

The thing is, I like Barbara Streisand, even when she's predictably chatting her son's ear off and calling him every ten minutes in order to check up on him. She's still a tremendously funny performer, and impossible to dismiss. Here's she's mostly just playing her usual screen persona with some maternal exaggerations, but it's nice to see her again, and I can't help thinking she could have really brought some spark to some of the roles I've been seeing Diane Keaton and Diane Lane in lately. I can't remember the last time I saw Streisand in a screen role this substantial, and that's a shame. Even though this is really slight material, she commits to it fully. And on the other side we've got Seth Rogen, who I've been slowly coming around to lately, and it's good to see him playing a good guy, who cares about his mother, and puts up with her demands to a heroic degree. He brings a good-natured snarkiness to the table, and the best scenes are of him and Streisand in the car, just talking and ad libbing. The credits sequence features a bunch of alternate takes with different jokes.

Watching "The Guilt Trip," which is so predictable that I was ticking off the plot points and the twists through the whole last third, I discovered that the movie was nonetheless doing a fantastic job of appealing to my yen for a certain kind of feel-good movies. They can be formulaic, but they can't feel too schmaltzy. They can be aimed at the older crowd, but not solely at the older crowd. They can require a lot of suspension of disbelief as long as they have a good sense of humor, which "The Guilt Trip" mostly does. But when I go back through the movie, what really appeals to me is that Rogen and Streisand manage to present us with a warm, funny, functional parent-child relationship. Movies about family ties are usually about the problematic ones, about the angry, bitter, destructive ones. This makes for great drama, but tends to leave the viewer feeling like hell.

Family is one of my big anchors in life, and I admit that I tend to romanticize happy families. I think this is why I respond so strongly to movies like "The Descendants" and "Win Win," and "Juno." These are stories that put the family unit under strain, but in the end they endure. And they show family relationships the way I tend to view mine as I've gotten older – a little awkward, a little bumpy, and full of compromises. The Brewsters may have drifted apart in "The Guilt Trip," requiring various wacky adventures and misunderstandings to get them back on the same page, but it's clear from the outset that these two care about each other. And seeing them affirm that put a big stupid grin on my face, even as I was wincing through the ancient jokes, and the way-too-obvious reveal about what happened to Joyce's lost love, and the slam-dunk pitch that finally gets Andy his big sale.

"The Guilt Trip" is meant more for older moms than their adult children, because the story definitely skews toward more mature tastes and viewpoints. Joyce is the one who has a love interest, and who always seems to have the upper hand. Still, the balance is pretty good. I was definitely sympathizing with Seth Rogen's character the whole way through, and there was just enough ribald humor that his usual fanbase should find the movie tolerable to sit through – but not so ribald that they can't watch it with their mothers.
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