Anne Fletcher · 2012 · road

Anne Fletcher's 2012 road comedy, written by Dan Fogelman and dedicated to his mother, after a drive he once took with her. Andy Brewster is a UCLA organic chemist who has sunk his life savings into an eco-friendly cleaning product called ScieoClean, and has eight days and three thousand miles of sales pitches lined up between New Jersey and the Pacific. Stopping at his widowed mother Joyce's house first, he learns he was named for Andrew Margolis, a boy she loved before his father - a man who never objected to her marriage and left her believing she had never mattered to him. One phone call turns up an Andrew Margolis in San Francisco. Andy invites his mother along and does not tell her why. She meddles, he seethes, and somewhere between a fifty-ounce steak and the Grand Canyon the two of them stop being a burden to each other and start being company.

1. 1
   Paramus, New Jersey

   Joyce's house. Andy arrives off a failed K-Mart pitch and tells her it went well so she will not worry. Over ice cream she lets slip that he is named after Andrew Margolis, a boy she loved in Florida before his father - and that when he failed to object to the wedding, she decided she had never mattered to him. Andy does the thing she never has, and looks him up. 'You want to spend a week, in a car, with your mother?'

2. 2
   Nashville, Tennessee

   Down the Shenandoah and west. The film sends Andy to a buyer in Virginia somewhere on this stretch - it names the state and never the town. In Nashville Joyce steers them to his ex-girlfriend Jessica, matchmaking on her own account; what it mostly reveals is how much of her son's life she has not been told about.

3. 3
   Lubbock, Texas

   Cattleman's Ranch, and a fifty-ounce steak that is free if you can finish it. Andy finally admits he is failing; Joyce takes the challenge on, coached through it by a cowboy-businessman named Ben Graw, and walks out with the steak and his phone number. 'That's like eating a poodle.' The restaurant is invented - the challenge is the Big Texan's up the road in Amarillo, which cites this film in its own visitor reviews to this day.

4. 4
   Santa Fe, New Mexico

   Another buyer, another pitch that dies before he can reach the end of it - the running joke of the film is that nobody ever lets him finish. ScieoClean is safe enough to drink, and eventually he drinks it.

5. 5
   Grand Canyon, Arizona

   Joyce has always wanted to see it, so they go. Nothing is transacted and no product is pitched, which is rather the point: by here they are travelling together rather than merely sharing a car.

6. 6
   Las Vegas, Nevada

   The pitch the whole trip was built around. Joyce enjoys herself so thoroughly that she offers to stay behind and let Andy drive on alone - which forces him to confess why San Francisco was ever on the itinerary.

7. 7
   San Francisco, California

   The continent runs out at the Pacific. They find an Andrew Margolis, and he is not the man Joyce has carried for forty years - Adam Scott is billed as Andrew Margolis Jr. Joyce decides it is enough anyway: you name a child after someone you cherished and wanted to remember, so she must have mattered. They part at the airport, Andy to his next pitch and Joyce home to New Jersey, where she calls Ben Graw.