"Your Place or Mine" is an extremely pleasant sit, and made slightly less bland with charming stars

Your Place or Mine (2023)

In “Your Place or Mine,” we’re made to believe that Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher are best friends. It’s not totally inconceivable. Their characters, Debbie and Peter, talk every day. They’re not a couple, although they hooked up after a poker game 20 years ago when they both lived in Los Angeles. With cute scribbled text and arrows, the film lets us know 2003 was the year she had “flat-ironed hair” and he wore a “pointless earring.” In a way, this is the kind of romantic comedy that would have been released two decades earlier, too. Luckily, “Your Place or Mine” has Witherspoon and Kutcher because the film is dependent on its stars’ charm. 

Debbie still resides in the City of Angeles, but Peter now lives on the east coast in New York. She’s a perky single mother, overprotective of her allergic-to-everything 13-year-old son Jack (Wesley Kimmel), but she has her life together. She loves books and she does the accounting at her son’s school. Peter has always wanted to be a writer, but he shelved that dream to become a business consultant who listens to The Cars (all the time). When Debbie has some professional training to finish in Manhattan, she plans on staying with Peter. But at the last minute when Debbie is in a pinch for a babysitter, Peter offers to fly to L.A., watch Jack and stay in her chaotic, post-it-filled home, while Debbie takes Peter’s sterile penthouse apartment. Will Jack become less of a bachelor in L.A.? Will Debbie let her hair down in New York? How long will it take them both to finally realize that they are actually each other’s soul mates? A long time. 

Making her feature directorial debut, writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna must love “The Holiday,” that cinematic cream puff of a romantic comedy where Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz swap homes. This is her bread and butter, having written “The Devil Wears Prada” and “27 Dresses,” but even the former had some bite. The script for “Your Place or Mine” has the least amount of edge. It’s glossy, sunny, cozy, creamy, and extremely pleasant, but the writing is never sharp enough to be more than that. Even if its romantic leads don’t share the same physical space for most of the running time (split screens don't count!), “Your Place or Mine” is mainly made more appealing and less bland because of Witherspoon. Kutcher is coasting in his comfort zone as the sweet guy with commitment issues, but Witherspoon is just so effortlessly likable, making a bit with a ridiculous cocktail that looks like a plant in a glass funnier than it has any right to be.

Of course, this being an old-fashioned romantic comedy, Peter and Debbie are joined by several sounding boards who don't seem to have lives of their own. As Debbie's school co-worker and best L.A. friend Alicia (who is always drinking coffee), Tig Notaro is a major source of humor, tossing off every observational line with her dry, pitch-perfect comic timing. Then there's Minka, one of Peter's former girlfriends living in the building who quickly becomes a hanger-on sidekick for Debbie. It's a complete contrivance for Minka to become fast friends with Debbie, just so she isn’t alone and can converse with someone in her section of the film. Since she's played by the always-delightful Zoë Chao, Minka does, however, end up being more fun to hang around than the leads. But there’s really no reason for Steve Zahn, as lovably goofy as he always is, when he seems to exist in a much broader movie as Zen, Debbie’s hippie neighbor who practically lives to tend to her garden (and that’s not an euphemism). Finally, in Debbie's case, she gets a romantic obstacle in the form of a hot publisher, played by the unbelievably gorgeous Jesse Williams. 

The outcome is as easy to solve as 1+1, but that’s not always a non-negotiable with this kind of movie. The real question is, does it feel earned? Well, the actors are selling it, but the film's change of heart feels overly prefabricated and a little false, taking these slow pokes the entire movie to figure out what they really needed was on the other coast all along. And when it finally gets to the public declaration of love, the film decides its climax really does belong back in the 2000s with the most clichéd setting of all: an airport. “Your Place or Mine” is only subversive in how safe and predictable it is for a romantic comedy in 2023, but forgone conclusions can still go down comfortably. You don’t even have to leave your place to watch it.

Grade: C +

Netflix is releasing “Your Place or Mine” (109 min.) to stream on February 10, 2023.