Long-Distance Relationship

Romcom throwback Your Place or Mine breezes down a memory lane of tropes, but is light on laughs and passion

BY CHASE HUTCHINSON

Early on in Your Place or Mine, we hear a quirky neighbor remark on how a different character gardening far at the edge of the frame is just the funniest guy. The reason? Well, he’s from Spokane. No further explanation is offered. We never actually meet this mysterious man, and the film zips along to the next scenario. However, in the entire runtime of this nearly twohour romcom, this was the moment that stood out the most. There was something distinctly silly about a throwaway line whose humor is premised upon the supposedly vast strangeness of Spokane and those who once lived there that, likely not in the way it was intended to, elicited a small chuckle. In a film where laughs were in increasingly short supply and there was little to get invested in, it was an odd diamond in the rough.

Rated PG-13

Still, YPoM is mostly just rough. Telling the story of two friends who moved across the country from each other after a brief fling 20 years prior, Your Place or Mine picks up with each at a turning point in their respective lives. Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) is a single mom living in Los Angeles who has to go to New York for her final exam for her master’s degree. Her pal Peter (Ashton Kutcher) is a bachelor living in New York who has recently seen the end of yet another shortterm relationship. After Debbie’s babysitter plans fall through, he agrees to swap places with her to watch her son, Jack (Wesley Kimmel), so she can make the trip. As each begins to get a glimpse of the life the other leads, they find themselves reflecting on what could have been had they stayed together all those years ago. Would they have fallen in love? Is it too late for them to do so?

Though Witherspoon brings some energy to her part of the story and offers a few line deliveries that have a bit more bite, this only makes Kutcher seem further out of his depth. Though he has played a loveable goof in the past, he just doesn’t have the charisma to sell this character.

To cut him a little bit of slack, part of this comes down to the writing of his story, which feels particularly flat and contrived. More and more, the story wants us to believe he is a softy at heart, though it never puts in the work to get us there.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE

Directed by Aline Brosh McKenna Starring Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher, Tig Notaro Streaming on Netflix starting Feb. 10

The plot exacerbates the chemistry void, as Witherspoon and Kutcher rarely share a room together. Most of their interactions take place in starkly lit video calls against flat backgrounds, which creates a distance between their characters and leaves everything feeling dispassionate. The longer this goes on, the more you’re left wondering when the film will ditch this technological artifice. Further, cinematic comedy comes in the cuts, and having your two characters primarily share a split screen doesn’t allow for that. When the movie finally abandons the tech divide, there is a comedic enough reveal, but it’s mostly cold comfort after the overlong road it took to get there.

The biggest problem with the film is that the chemistry between the two leads, the foundation of any romantic comedy, is just never there. There has to be some spark to light the flame and the passion that gets us to care about the answers to the obvious questions that the story poses.

There is a whole host of comedic talent around this journey from a silly Steve Zahn as the aforementioned Spokanite neighbor to a sarcastic Tig Notaro as the duo’s mutual friend to a zany Zoë Chao as an ex-girlfriend. But the pieces just never come together to be something that is funny enough to be humorous or romantic enough to be heartfelt. It feels reverse engineered to get to its destination safely, leaving little of anything to remember along the way. Romcoms can be good, touching fun, but this one just never offers much beyond the lightest of embraces. n