Your Place or Mine (2023)
Directed by Aline Brosh McKenna
Written by Aline Brosh McKenna
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher, Jesse Williams, Zoe Chao, Tig Notaro
Release Date February 10th, 2023
Published February 13th, 2023
The slapdash, clumsy and derivative new romantic comedy, Your Place or Mine still manages to have moments of grace and genuine romance. It's a shame the movie is so dedicated to playing the rom-com greatest hits that it cannot fully take advantage of the few good moments. No, sadly, the latest effort from the generally quite good writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna is by far her most mundane, by the numbers effort. Despite a pair leads with decent chemistry, Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, Your Place or Mine falls well short of rom-com greatness.
In Your Place or Mine Reese Witherspoon is Debbie and Ashton Kutcher is Peter. We meet them on the first night they hooked up, 20 years ago, following a game of poker. Shortly after that, Peter told Debbie that they should not be together as he's bad at being in relationships. Somehow, they remained not just friends but best friends and went on with their lives. Each gave up their dreams, her to be a book editor and him to be an author, and found vague levels of success in other endeavors. She's an accountant for her son's school and he's a movie conception of a consultant, the nebulously defined but wealthy kind of fallback character job that hack screenwriters assign so as not to have to spend time on backstory.
A clumsy opening series of scenes sets in stone the very obvious arc of this already quite obvious romance. Debbie needs to loosen up and have some fun, Peter needs to learn how to be responsible to others and become selfless. Commence the deus ex machina. The brilliant Rachel Bloom drops in from a completely different movie and sets the plot in motion by not being able to watch Debbie's son, Jack (Wesley Kimmel), while Debbie was set to go to New York to see Peter and take a course to advance her accounting career.
Knowing that his friend is counting on this class in New York, Peter decides to get on a plane and go to L.A and watch Jack while Debbie stays at his place in New York. While in New York, Debbie befriends the best character in Your Place or Mine, Peter's ex-hook up, Minka, played by Zoe Chao. To say that Chao steal the movie is an understatement. She's the character with the most personality, the most organic growth, and all of the best jokes in the movie. She befriends Debbie as a sort of mini-deus ex machina as it is her job within her subplot to get Debbie to find Peter's book and give it to a sexy book editor, played by Jesse Williams.
Williams is obvious roadblock between Debbie and Peter's happily ever after. He offers her an alternative romance with someone she is more obviously compatible with. But, we already know where this is headed and the movie doesn't give Williams much to play to turn his role into anything more than a speed bump on the way to the obvious conclusion. It's incredibly disappointing to watch these terrifically talented people acting out a script that is the bare minimum of effort and confounding why someone as talented as Aline Brosh McKenna fell back on so much lazy screenwriting.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
