Valentine’s Day leads many of us to lament not just the sad status of our love lives, but also the much worse situation of the romantic comedy, a genre that has recently been resurrected but still needs a shock back to life.
The streamer-led deluge of 90-minute meet-cutes has undoubtedly been steady after a marked lack, but it’s also been continuously underwhelming, possibly inoffensively so, but also more frustrating to those of us who fondly recall the finest of them. Even if you don’t anticipate a thorough reinvention of the wheel, there’s laziness that niggles – it’s as if these films are being pounded out by writers and filmmakers who are half-asleep, their attention elsewhere.
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Reese Witherspoon’s return to both the genre and film in general, her first main part in six years since another romantic comedy, Home Again, may make one expect a bit more. However, Netflix’s maddeningly milquetoast Your Place or Mine, which pairs her with Ashton Kutcher, is just about as forgettable as most of the mulch we’ve been spoon-fed recently, but significantly more disappointing given both Witherspoon’s involvement and writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna’s involvement.
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While McKenna did lump us in with I Don’t Know How She Does It and the Annie remake, she also wrote the smart and charming scripts for 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada, and the frustratingly under-appreciated Morning Glory, as well as co-creating the excellent and often daringly subversive Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It’s perplexing that she’d make this her directorial debut, something so edgeless and unspecific, with just hints of the humor and tenderness we’ve seen from her previous work.
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The plot weaves together elements from previous romcoms: best friends who may be soulmates in disguise from When Harry Met Sally, the big star pairing who only spend one scene together throughout the film from Sleepless in Seattle, and the house swap from The Holiday, a not uninteresting pot of ingredients to be roused but one that remains stuck at room temperature until the end.
The Gwen Stefani & Akon song The Great Escape leads an opening scene from 2003, peppered with pieces of on-screen text showing us just how very 2003 it all is (trucker hat – check), while Witherspoon and Kutcher’s characters enjoy a drunken one-night affair.
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Not only did The Great Escape come out three years later, but this gimmicky flourish was then dropped until the very end. With a hasty introduction that doesn’t show us enough of the characters’ first interaction, the film begins with disturbing sloppiness.
We soon find ourselves in the present, with Witherspoon’s uptight single mother in LA and her hookup turned bestie, Kutcher’s caddish man about town, in Brooklyn. The video then shows them staying at each other’s houses for a week – she to finish a college course, he to care after her son – and realizing that no prizes for guessing, they should be living in the same city.
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For a brief moment, it appeared as if Witherspoon had finally come to Earth after years of coasting with aircraft flicks. Her early work revealed a fearless young performer who pushed herself and us as an audience with dark and difficult films like Freeway, Election, American Psycho, Best Laid Plans, and Pleasantville. Legally Blonde’s merited success in 2001 locked her in cutesy mode, casting her as America’s darling, defanged and without actual struggle. The 2014 adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a barnstorming reminder of what she can and is willing to achieve, drew her back from the brink, leading to a tiny role in Inherent Vice and the complex domestic delights of Big Little Lies.
It was, however, short-lived, with most of her time now devoted to Apple’s hilariously bad hate watch The Morning Show. Another setback is that her big-screen return is Your Place or Mine, which is the type of forgettable fluff she might have fronted a decade ago.
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It’s not just annoying to watch her explicitly caught in neurotic helicopter mom mode yet again (especially when it’s written with no actual depth or nuance), but it’s also annoying to see the film adhere to the most boringly gendered cliches possible. She enjoys cooking! He enjoys womanizing! The roles would have been switched in a considerably more fascinating rendition, with him as the clinging father and she as the commitment-phobe. There are small glimpses of something more fascinating, and grownup, at work here – Kutcher’s playboy is a recovering alcoholic, Witherspoon’s mother was a heavy drinker, their friendship has been tested in painful ways – hints that the screenplay was once a little more emotionally complicated.
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But it’s all been polished down to nothing, and what should have seemed at least vaguely grounded swiftly devolves into a stupid cartoon with two boring and relatively unimpeachable protagonists backed up by goofy one-note characters performed to the hilt by Zoe Chao and Steve Zahn as if they were in a children’s film. Even as a glossy run-of-the-mill formula, it’s never as hilarious or romantic as it should be, lacking sparkling one-liners and plagued by the duo having to create chemistry during phone calls that never seem as lived-in as they might for friends with such much history.
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Your Place or Mine is as half-hearted as they come for a film marketed as this year’s major Valentine’s Day viewing.
Your Place or Mine is currently accessible on Netflix.