Director: Aline Brosh McKenna
Writer: Aline Brosh McKenna
Stars: Ashton Kutcher, Reese Witherspoon, Tig Notaro
Synopsis: Two long-distance best friends change each other’s lives when she decides to pursue a lifelong dream and he volunteers to keep an eye on her teenage son.
This is a good week for fans of romantic comedies. Despite Magic Mike’s The Last Dance not exactly fitting into this genre, the target audience is similar. The film will occupy theaters, while Somebody I Used to Know (Prime Video) and Your Place or Mine (Netflix) will take care of home viewings. The latter puts Aline Brosh McKenna (writer of The Devil Wears Prada) in the director’s chair for the first time in her career, just like Ashton Kutcher (Vengeance) and Reese Witherspoon (A Wrinkle in Time) who had never worked together before.
The evolution of streaming has allowed for an increase of rom-coms, something that, like everything else in the movie industry, has its benefits and drawbacks. The constant influx of narratives of this type dampens enthusiasm for new films, giving the impression of simply rewatching the same story with different characters and actors. However, there are so many opportunities nowadays that, eventually, movies emerge that warrant all the attention in the world. Your Place or Mine doesn’t quite reach that point and doesn’t escape the predictable genre boundaries, but it manages to avoid some formulas that are often overused.
Honestly, I don’t remember a rom-com where the protagonists rarely spend time together. In Your Place or Mine, Debbie (Witherspoon) and Peter (Kutcher) don’t even share five minutes of screentime with each other… physically. The first reaction to this observation raises, as expected, a lot of questions. How can viewers care about a potential love affair between two characters who have virtually no interaction with each other in person? Is it even possible to get emotionally invested in Debbie and Peter if one never sees them together for most of the film?
Surprisingly, the answer is “yes”. McKenna presents and develops the profound friendship of the protagonists through several phone calls, which, theoretically, have every opportunity to go wrong. However, with excellent editing and camera work, Your Place or Mine splits its screen in half, showing Debbie and Peter living their individual lives in distinct places while communicating with each other, as opposed to the typical cut-line-cut in this kind of situation. In addition to being a clear sign of how close they are emotionally, that line in the middle becomes less and less visible to the viewer.
I believe the chemistry between Witherspoon and Kutcher is fantastic, but in Your Place or Mine, the actors must convince the audience that their characters are unquestionably in sync without actually acting off of each other… and they succeed. Debbie and Peter have moved on with their lives, but their 20-year friendship is marked by constant contact and concern. McKenna’s script may follow an extremely predictable path with character arcs seen a thousand times before, but her storytelling method is both smart and captivating.
The rest of the cast also stands out. Tig Notaro and Zoë Chao bring a lot of humor to more uneventful moments, but it’s the young actor Wesley Kimmel who impresses with a very mature performance. Despite McKenna’s “tricks” – she demonstrates much potential as a director – Your Place or Mine is nothing more than an “auto-pilot experience”, that is, there’s no exciting phase or a riveting moment to stun viewers. It’s a light, inoffensive viewing, but also not particularly memorable or impactful.
Furthermore, Your Place or Mine lacks a more innovative message. Formulaic narratives and generic developments are one thing, but a movie’s essential message must always have an impact. “It’s never too late to go back” or “we should enjoy every second of our lives” are phrases with their due importance, but they feel underwhelming in the context of the story, especially when Debbie is a single mother of a boy with several health issues – which, surprisingly, never have any kind of impact on the course of the film – and Peter is a man who has been with dozens of women.
Your Place or Mine is a more than satisfying rom-com. Aline Brosh McKenna manages to elevate the genre’s narrative formulas with her personal, intelligent storytelling, offering an unusual point of view for the emotional growth between two protagonists separated for practically the entire runtime. Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher deliver good performances, along with the rest of the amusing cast, taking advantage of the long takes to flex their acting muscles. Predictable and lacking memorable messages, but I couldn’t recommend it more for fans of the genre.
Grade: B-
