'Your Place or Mine' Is An Old School Romantic Comedy
by EG
The Netflix romantic comedy Your Place or Mine has the decked stacked against it. The romantic comedy genre doesn't get a lot of respect, and the almost daily deluge of low-quality rom coms being produced doesn't help much. But the new movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher takes the best of the rom com formula and comes up with an enjoyable result. Read on for details.
The last 20 years have done a number on the romantic comedy. Maligned by disinterested studios churning out tepid derivatives and suffocated by an overbearing discourse marshaled by disappointed fans, the genre can’t seem to catch a break. The headlines have been unsparing: The romantic comedy is dead! The romantic comedy never mattered! Occasionally a film will revive minor faith in the future of the genre, but for the most part recent attempts to save one of cinema’s most cherished categories of comfort food have been forgettable affairs.
Given these circumstances, I approached Your Place or Mine with suspicion and some exasperation. On paper the project has potential: Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher star as Debbie and Peter, the two people we will patiently wait to see fall in love over the course of 2 hours. Both are performers who have built up enough good will over the years to activate our nostalgia. Aline Brosh McKenna, who wrote the screenplays for 27 Dresses and The Devil Wears Prada, is screenwriter and director. A charming group of actors are cast in supporting roles. But even a film with so much seemingly going for it can come up empty.
Thankfully, Your Place or Mine doesn’t. It’s a breezy charmer — the kind of movie these obits have been mourning over the years. The film returns to the genre’s blueprint and sticks with it. There are a couple of instances of subversion, moments when Your Place or Mine winks and pokes fun at itself. But for the most part it doesn’t want to surprise or be more clever than the viewer; it aims to please, and in doing so helps re-energize the romantic comedy.
The film opens with a poker game in Los Angeles at the home of Debbie (Witherspoon). We can tell it’s 2003 — not because of the fashion choices the film cheekily points out through arrows and lists, but because Debbie could save enough in her 20s to own her place. Peter (Kutcher), an aspiring writer and emotionally disconnected man she beats in poker, thinks that’s very cool. She is strong-willed and independent; he’s a bit more of a wayward soul. They bond over a shared love of literature. The two have sex, but don’t end up together. They maintain a 20-year friendship instead.
In the present day, Debbie is an accountant and single mother to Jack (Wesley Kimmel). Her last marriage to a mountain climber didn’t work out; he wanted adventure and she wanted stability. Peter is a brand consultant who lives in New York now because of a fear of earthquakes (or so he repeatedly says). His apartment — unlike Debbie’s warm home filled with years of memories and things — is a barren luxury condo in Brooklyn with killer views of the Manhattan Bridge.
Despite their laundry list of differences and hundreds of miles of between them, Debbie and Peter have managed to nurture their platonic relationship. Their bond is indeed so strong that each of Peter’s ex-girlfriends — all of whom dump him after six months — know about Debbie despite having never met her. Fifteen minutes into Your Place or Mine, we know where the story is heading. And that’s OK — enjoyable, even — because McKenna constructs a tight narrative around the couple. Your Place or Mine is less “will they or won’t they?” and more “why didn’t they?”.
Get the rest of the review at The Hollywood Reporter.