IN Anne Fletcher’s road-trip/family movie, Barbra Streisand plays obsessive widowed mother Joyce whose chemist son Andy (Seth Rogen) loves her but has tried to live beyond her influence.

Andy has developed a miracle cleaner made from food ingredients and is about to cross America pitching it to supermarket chains. In a heart-to-heart over the dinner table, Joyce tells him she named him after Andrew whom she didn’t marry. Andy locates Andrew in San Francisco and invites Joyce to accompany him on the drive without telling her his real reason.

“Guilt Trip” spends more energy dealing with Joyce’s volubility than observing America east to west. Andy and Joyce are two-dimensional characters. Neither Streisand nor Rogen needs to sweat in their delivery.

Writer Dan Fogelman fuels their journey with a collection of gags, cliches and predictabilities that depend heavily on Joyce’s inability to respond to Andy’s needs, wishes and concerns. The film uses that parental defect (some might call it a quality) as the story’s main structural member. And it gets to be a bit tedious.

At Hoyts and Limelight