It is probably not great news for your project if you spend half the press tour defending your lack of red-carpet chemistry with your co-star. The carpet may be kinder, though, or at least mercifully briefer, than actually sitting through Your Place or Mine, an experience that often feels like watching two movie stars try to set fire to a pile of wet leaves for 100-plus minutes. What should be breezy, featherweight fun — Reese! Ashton! A screenplay by the lady who wrote The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses! — instead turns out to be oddly hollow, a meandering and synthetic approximation of classic rom-com canon with too little romance or comedy in its strained, familiar formula.
Wet piles or not, it is of course foregone that these two will end up together by the last shot: Witherspoon’s Debbie, a cheerful Los Angeles accountant and single mom, and Kutcher’s Tom, a successful New York business consultant with a vaguely broken soul (his loft apartment is immaculate, and all his relationships die by the six-month mark). They’ve been best friends for nearly 20 years, after one misbegotten night together long ago; now Debbie needs an accounting certificate that she can only get in Manhattan, so Tom agrees to fly out and watch her young son, Jack (Wesley Kimmel; yes, he’s Jimmy’s nephew) while she does it.
Soon Debbie is ensconced in Tom’s Brooklyn bachelor pad getting her Gen-X groove back, and he’s in her L.A. cottage, teaching the overprotected Jack how to live. Naturally, this coastal exchange program also entails recruiting at least one new sidekick-slash-antagonist for them both: Debbie gets Minka (Love Life’s Zoe Chao), a daffy party girl in Tom’s casual dating rotation who insists on showing her the best of New York — including a bar where a dreamboat book publisher named Theo (Jesse Williams) awaits, ready to reawaken Debbie’s dusty loins. Tom gets Tig Notaro’s Alicia, a brightly sardonic teacher at Jack’s school, and Steve Zahn as a neighbor who mostly loiters in Debbie’s yard like a stoned garden gnome.
As in many movies like this, the ancillary characters are easily more interesting than the central ones we’re supposed to care about. Can’t we follow Alicia home to her two kids and her wife who makes bad recipes she found on TikTok? What might Theo and Minka get up to on a Friday night when they’re not busy helping blonde ladies from L.A. self-actualize? Instead, screenwriter and director Aline Brosh McKenna — whose credits include Cruella, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and perhaps most deathlessly, the aforementioned Prada — continues to toggle between her polished, empty leads, marking time till the moment these two hollow-core planks finally acknowledge their destiny (trust that there will be wildly obvious epiphanies, achieved in airports).
Tom and Debbie are so broadly sketched out, and their conflicts and issues so indifferently resolved — there’s a literary subplot that wafts in, then promptly sees itself it out — it’s as if McKenna can’t quite be bothered, and so she just gestures vaguely at the CliffsNotes of all the rom-coms that came before. The box-office success late last year of the weightless George Clooney-Julia Roberts caper Ticket to Paradise proved that there’s a whole unserved demographic still hungry for movies like these: millions weaned on exactly the kind of clever, fizzy confections that rightfully made Witherspoon and Kutcher famous. Those same viewers will probably make Your Place a hit too, or whatever counts as the equivalent on Netflix. But everyone here — the actors, the audience, the genre — deserves better.
