Mark Reviews Movies: YOUR PLACE OR MINE

Your Place or Mine, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 9, 2023

It's almost impossible to explain what goes wrong with Your Place or Mine without revealing how it ends. That's not much of a problem, because the ending is probably the least surprising thing about writer/director Aline Brosh McKenna's movie. It's a romantic comedy about two best friends and one-time lovers played by two stars, and if one doesn't even have an inkling as to where this story will go, it's probably best to stop reading this review right now. One shouldn't have the experience of watching a Hollywood romantic comedy for the first time ruined by even the suggestion of how such material will end.

For the rest of us, the conclusion here is pretty much inevitable, although Brosh McKenna, making her feature debut, does almost convince us that this movie will be different in at least one significant way. The two main characters, after all, genuinely seem as if they're just the best of friends—nothing more, apart from that one night 20 years prior to the story, and nothing less, because that could and should be more than enough.

However, our protagonists did have sex two decades before the story proper begins, and the scene is played as a joke, with on-screen titles pointing out all of the circa-2003 fashion choices that the two made at the time. In the moment, the gag is disarming in the way it distances us from whatever connection these two might be having at the time, and it seems like early confirmation that Brosh McKenna actually and only wants us to see these two as friends, in spite of this one-time thing. That's also despite the fact that the two characters are played by Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, while nobody else in the movie who might be a potential romantic partner for either character comes close to the level of fame of these two.

The whole movie feels as if it's existing in a state of cognitive dissonance. For every detail that tells us this is some generic romantic comedy, there's another thing that tries to assert that it's nothing of the sort.

Take the basic premise, for example, which revolves around the fact that Witherspoon's Debbie and Kutcher's Peter are on opposite ends of the country at almost every point in the story. If this is meant to be a romance-in-the-making, it's making a fundamental error in judgment in setting up the plot in this way.

Remember, we see Debbie and Peter together at the beginning, and that scene is played for laughs, not to establish some kind of emotional connection between the two. It would almost certainly cheat us of feeling this bond if, somehow, the only time these two actors and characters are in the same space together is at the start and during some hypothetical scene at the end, right? If that's to be case, it would obviously make for a pretty unconvincing romance, and we'll just leave that line of thinking at that.

The gimmick here is that Debbie, who lives as a divorced single mother with her pre-teen son Jack (Wesley Kimmel) in Los Angeles, and Peter, who lives a bachelor's existence in New York, are going to reunite in person for the first time in almost a decade. She has a class to take in New York and will crash with Peter, but when her babysitter bails, Debbie assumes she has to say home. Instead, Peter buys himself a plane ticket to L.A., so that he can watch Jack and Debbie can have a week on her own in New York. It's quite sweet, and the gesture and the sincerity of these performances really sell us on the idea that—maybe, just possibly—the whole notion that these two really are just friends is genuine.

The rest of the divided narrative is a mixed bag. The stuff with Jack learning how to be responsible and teaching Jack to find himself apart from the expectations of the kid's mother is effective. Debbie's adventures—in which she has a ready-made pal/sidekick randomly arrive in the person of one of Peter's many ex-girlfriends, played by Zoë Chao, simply because that's sort of a prerequisite for material like this—aren't nearly as involving.

Sure, she learns to have a little fun and has some flirtatious back-and-forth with handsome book publisher Theo (Jesse Williams), but too much of her side of the story revolves around Peter. She finds a manuscript that her friend secretly wrote and thinks she can help his career by shopping it to Theo, and then, she starts to figure out what other secrets Peter might have been keeping from her—ones that she might have been hiding from herself, because they're just really, really good friends, after all.

We want to buy that idea, if only because it's a bit different, because Brosh McKenna goes so far out of her way to convince us of it for so long, and because the payoff if Your Place or Mine turns out to be some generic romantic comedy would almost certainly be an underwhelming cheat. This is all hypothetically speaking, of course, so hypothetically, that ending would be a massive disappointment.

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