My World of Flops Crazy People/Pre-Loqueesha Case File #183 The Couch Trip (1988)

The 1988 dark comedy The Couch Trip stars three of my all-time favorite comic performers in Dan Aykroyd, Charles Grodin and Walter Matthau and was directed by one of my favorite directors in Michael Ritchie, the man who gave us Downhill Racer, Prime Cut, The Candidate, Smile, The Bad News Bears and, to a much lesser extent, Fletch and The Golden Child. 

Yet it inexplicably took forty five years and a month on this website devoted to Charles Grodin for me to finally see The Couch Trip and write about it whereas I have seen, for example, Taking Care of Business, which is a wildly inferior version of this movie, at least twice.

I suppose that’s because The Couch Trip falls into a weird repetitional limbo. It wasn’t hated enough to qualify as something I would necessarily HAVE to see within my capacity as someone who writes about things that are terrible and disastrously received. 

Yet it also doesn’t have a dedicated cult of defenders evangelizing on its behalf or much of a following at all, as far as I can discern. 

Finally catching up to The Couch Trip thirty-four years after it was released to mixed to negative reviews and underwhelming box-office it’s easy to see why it did not connect with audiences or critics. 

There’s a lot about The Couch Trip that simply does not work. The plot engenders intense cognitive dissonance and requires extreme suspension of disbelief. It asks us to buy into the premise that George Maitlin (Charles Grodin), a superstar radio shrink a la Joyce Brothers would hand over the keys to his kingdom to a random psychiatrist from the Midwest, sight unseen, for six months without doing any due diligence or even knowing what he looks like. 

I’m not entirely sure what Walter Matthau is doing in the movie and the third act just sort of fizzles out when it should be building to a climax. Donna Dixon’s female lead is even more arbitrary and under-written than most and the film’s poster—a badly photoshopped image of Aykroyd, Matthau and Dixon sharing the same outsized straight jacket—screams “Stay away! Nothing good can come of watching this monstrosity! Spend the precious, rare moments God has blessed you with doing something of value and worth, like telling your grandparents that you love them instead.” 

The lead role of a brilliant mental patient who becomes an instant sensation as a politically incorrect truth teller on radio calls for an innate gift for anarchy, chaos and mayhem that came naturally to Aykroyd’s old partner John Belushi and his old cast-mate Bill Murray but that Aykroyd has to work at. 

Yet as a scruffy, unloved stray mutt of a movie The Couch Trip has a lot going for it, beginning with a wonderfully acidic turn from Charles Grodin as a spectacularly successful pop psychologist who hates himself but not quite as much as he hates everyone else and life itself. 

I described Grodin’s sad sack suicidal depressive in The Lonely Guy as the saddest man in the world but the suicidal depressive he plays here is every bit as hilariously despondent. 

Only instead of turning that sadness inward Grodin’s misanthropic doc rages against a world he feels nothing but contempt towards and clients he would seemingly strangle to death with his bare hands if given the opportunity. 

The Couch Trip begins with a montage of television doctors doling out soothing advice in sonorous tones, concluding with Joyce Brothers in 1960 and then Grodin’s George Maitlin at the very end. 

With a Stuart Smalley smile on his face, Maitlin is introduced confidently monologuing, “Now we all have feminine qualities. We’re part male and part female. Every man has a tiny vagina and every woman has a tiny penis, very, very tiny, but it’s there.” 

The not so good, not so sane doc clearly has penises and vaginas on the brain. When his concerned wife tries to rouse him from a Brian Wilson-like funk and get him to see his patients and talk to his listeners, his response is apoplectic.

“PATIENTS? With their petty penis problems and their empty vaginal concerns? Those vampires are sucking the life out of me!” Grodin rages from the safe, comforting cocoon of his bed, the covers pulled up tight around his head. 

Incidentally I always thought “Petty Penis Problems” and “Empty Vaginal Concerns” were two of the best Guided By Voices b-sides, back when they were a little raunchier. 

The millionaire radio personality and psychiatrist has a problem: if people know that he’s a suicidal depressive who attempted suicide following a nervous breakdown then they’ll lose faith in him as someone who can solve their problems. 

In real life, of course, nobody wrestles with mental illness and relies on the talking cure as much as psychiatrists and psychologists do. They also have famously high rates of suicide as well as depression yet The Couch Trip insists that the doctor’s reputation and career would never survive if his patients and listeners knew that he dealt with depression as well. 

George’s people suggest he take a six month sojourn away from the spotlight for the sake of his precarious mental health and lucrative, high profile career and leave his radio show and practice in the hands of someone who promises never to make him look bad by healing his patients or helping his listeners. 

They need a complete mediocrity like Dr. Lawrence Baird (David Clennon, deftly type-cast as an eminently punchable authority figure), an effete snob perpetually at war with John W. Burns Jr. (Dan Aykroyd), a smart, irreverent computer hacker who feigned mental illness to get out of prison and now serves as the righteous, rebellious Randle McMurphy of this particular psych ward. 

The ex-hacker with the line of non-stop patter uses his intellect and gift for mimicry to escape the mental hospital and head out to Los Angles to impersonate his old tormentor Dr. Baird during his lucrative L.A gig taking over for George Maitlan. 

Burns makes an indelible impression on his listeners and his new bosses when he very liberally sprinkles his advice with profanity and generally works bluer than Redd Foxx on the Chitlin Circuit. 

Instead of being horrified, however, listeners are amazed and blown away. The show rockets in popularity thanks to its new host’s populist brand of truth telling and the now massively famous media personality quickly establishes himself as the Andy Kaufman of radio psychologists. 

In a decidedly Kaufmanesque stunt, the fake doctor takes his patients to a baseball game in a series of rented buses, agrees to treat all of his clients for free and becomes so beloved so quickly that he’s asked to sing the National Anthem at the ballgame. 

Yes, The Couch Trip is a comedy about a casually wise everyman who becomes a smash hit with radio audiences after becoming the host of a call-in advice show under false pretenses. 

Somewhere, a young Jeremy Saville, future director of Loqueesha, was watching intently and thinking, “If I could do that, but racist and sexist, I could literally become the worst filmmaker in the world.” 

Grodin’s suicidal shrink proves just as despondent during his working vacation in England, where he meets the real Dr. Baird, someone he takes an immediate and intense dislike towards. Thanks to Grodin and Clennon’s fine work and potent chemistry, The Couch Trip is the rare slobs versus snobs lowbrow comedy where the snobs get bigger laughs and make more of an impression than the slobs.

Forty minutes into The Couch Trip Walter Matthau enters the proceedings as Donald Becker, an ex-mental patient and veteran con man our anti-hero first encounters in an airport working the old religion hustle. 

The fake doctor immediately sizes up Becker as someone very like him, an oddball too smart and unique for this sick, sad, conformist world. The two strike up a friendship that honestly could be cut without particularly hurting the movie, since  Matthau feels so awkwardly shoe-horned into a movie that benefits from him as a performer but rather ostentatiously does not need his character. 

Grodin absolutely loses it upon learning that his wife has cheated on him with his best friend and his show has been taken over by an impostor. Grodin spends much of the third act pointing a gun at various people, a look of pure, incandescent rage on his face. 

Maybe Ritchie thought he needed Matthau as a bonus slob to offset the combined snob power of Charles Grodin and David Clennon but his otherwise always welcome presence just adds to the sense of The Couch Trip being overloaded and under-written. 

The Couch Trip is a ferociously imperfect motion picture that asks you to over overlook an awful lot but if you play ball it can be a lot of fun, particularly as one of the last pure Aykroyd vehicles, before he got chubbier and started losing his hair and began gravitating towards supporting roles in forgettable mediocrities. 

But when he made The Couch Trip Aykroyd was still in his movie star prime, albeit towards the very end. 

I was not surprised to discover that The Couch Trip did well on home video after flopping in theaters. That’s because standards are lower and expectations more modest on home video, where the standard is less, “Is this movie good?” than “is this movie worth watching, particularly if you’re high and/or not paying attention? 

I wouldn’t exactly describe The Couch Trip as “good”, necessarily, but if you’re at all curious it’s a more than passable time-waster that is, in fact, worth watching if you’re high and/or not paying attention, and I cannot think of milder or more accurate praise! 

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