CAST : Ashton Kutcher, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Zahn, Wesley Kimmel, Jesse Williams, Zoë Chao, Tig Notaro
DIRECTOR: Aline Brosh McKenna
The movie spends most of it’s time trying to establish how the two are besties that talk to each other everyday. Remanents of their one-night stand from 20 years ago keep popping in here and there. But yeah, they are never in the same frame for the 99% of the movie.
But now Debbie needs to be in Manhattan for a week, while her backup child sitter bails on her. So because Peter is her friend- he volunteers to be in the step in mom for that week. So they swap homes where Debbie lands up in Peter’s functional Manhattan pad and Peter with Debbie’s son in her cluttered and post-ited LA home.
Debbie and Peter, the romantic duo at the center of Aline Brosh McKenna’s Your Place or Mine (now streaming on Netflix), wouldn’t make good roommates, let alone functional, full-time romantic partners who’d have to cram themselves into a shared space with a teenage son and force compromises over how to organize their books and whether potted plants ought to be tossed outside with the other dirt.
Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) and Peter ( the very still handsome Ashton Kutcher) are so deeply committed to proving to the world that they are “just good friends” and we needed to FF quite a few times.
The trap that the movie lays out is about two distinctively different people ( like in Hallmark movies) who live in different parts of the country have a mutual connect for 20 years. The movie tries to tickle you in trying to get your mind space about whether these two, despite their current state of affairs ( debbie as an uptight, too careful non-hockey mom and Peter as Manhattan’s favorite short-term boyfriend) can really be in a relationship.
Do they bring the better qualities out in each other and, clearly, they love each other. So why not finally make it happen? And in between is sprinkled all the books from Reese’s Book Club.
The plot offers us a full-blown case for reverting back to the anodyne safety and security of the familiar, no matter the substantial downsides. The romance choice between the leads is boiled down to be between any uncertain chemistry that enters their lives — a real, tactile, tingly sexual spark — or the chance to return to their shared, multi-decade past, to the person that they know will never leave them because they’ve always already been there. Guess which one they choose.
When Your Place or Mine opens, Debbie and Peter get the split-screened, made-for-each-other visual gags familiar from old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies, those cutely twinned shots of each of them lying in bed reading at the same time, bathing at the same time, ritualistically in sync in ways neither of them fully realizes. And then the backstories kick in and Your Place or Mine, which runs nearly two hours, gets distracted, pretending that it’s as worthwhile to watch Debbie chatting it up with Peter’s fab, New Yorkey ex as it is watching Peter try to play dad to Debbie’s perfectly well-adjusted teen.
Witherspoon and Kutcher have no romantic, and certainly no sexual, chemistry. You keep hoping they would stay “friends” but thats not the plot. If these two people were on an algorithm it would never match but then you also wouldnt get to see Kutcher do his thing or Witherspoon happily skipping her way to school in Manhattan with a back pack in Los Angeles style.
This movie entertaining in parts, squaring a circle for our benefit, giving both actors an AI youthful glow that defies the middle-aged temptation to settle while ensuring us that this is exactly what will happen because it “should.”
Why did we review it? Music is by Siddharth Khosla and you know how we promote Desis in media and entertainment.
Streams on Netflix.
