Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Your Place or Mine’ on Netflix, a Reese Witherspoon/Ashton Kutcher Rom-Com That Feels Left Over From 2003

Floofy rom-com Your Place or Mine (now on Netflix) does its damnedest to develop chemistry between Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher even though there’s a significant split-screen thing between them. See, they play longtime BFFs who swap places for a week, allowing him to experience her single-mom suburban thing while she gets a taste of his ritzy urban lifestyle. The film is from Aline Brosh McKenna – showrunner for My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, writer of The Devil Wears Prada, We Bought a Zoo and Cruella – who’s scripted many a rom-com before, but here makes her directorial debut. Our two principal stars are also wily screen veterans who, somehow, despite making many a rom-com themselves, have never starred together in one. Better late than never, or should’ve it just been never?

YOUR PLACE OR MINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 2003, and the depiction of said year is convincing, because that’s when so many movies like Your Place or Mine came out. Peter (Kutcher) and Debbie (Witherspoon) are madly facemashing as the sassy, life-of-their-own subtitles point out all the 2003isms in the shot: wallet chain, flatironed hair, etc. That was the one and only time Peter and Debbie commingled genitalia and now it’s 2023 and they’ve been besties ever since. They talk every day and share everything. She’s in LA, divorced with a 13-year-old son Jack (Wesley Kimmel) and an impossibly cute house and a wacky neighbor who does her gardening, Zen (Steve Zahn). He’s in NYC, a bachelor with many ladyfriends and a lucrative consulting job that allows him to use stupid words like “incentivization” and afford an apartment that looks like a million bucks times about 15, maybe 20. Deb’s plan is to crash with Pete while she takes a weeklong accounting course in NYC, but her babysitter flakes and his current gig dries up so he volunteers to take care of Jack in LA, so their planes essentially pass each other somewhere over Kansas.

Let’s divvy this up into two easy summaries so we’re not hopping back and forth between the two settings like the movie does. First, Pete: He’d been dating a woman for six months until she dumped him because their relationship was a dead shark. He gets to Deb’s house and it’s plastered with sticky notes because she’s been hovermomming the bejeezus out of Jack; he has many, many food allergies, see. Jack struggles to make friends and his mom won’t let him play hockey because she doesn’t want him to get hurt. Pete hopes that driving Jack around in a Porsche convertible, taking him and his schoolmates to see the Kings play in a luxury suite and secretly letting him try out for the hockey squad will help the kid’s mama’s-boy/social-isolation issues. Sometimes, he exchanges witty banter with Alicia (Tig Notaro), a friend who’s always walking into the frame ripe for such things. Pete and Jack get along just swell and he contemplates his active-but-empty love life and waitaminnit, is he carrying a torch?

Meanwhile, in NY, Deb finds herself in a moment where she doesn’t have to be mom mom mom and do nothing but read books all the time. She meets one of Pete’s ladyfriends, Minka (Zoë Chao), a terminally blasé cosmopolitanite who doesn’t seem to have much going on because she’s always walking into the frame ripe for witty banter, or a hangout sesh with Old Navy Denim Deb and her “sexy Gen-X earth mama thing.” They go out for a drink and whaddayaknow, at the bar is Deb’s favorite book publisher, Theo (Jesse Williams). She’s read all the books he’s published, even the unpopular ones. Real book maniac, she is. She even lands a date with the guy. Coincidentally, she finds Pete’s unpublished novel in the oven because he don’t bake shit. So much for Pete and Deb not having any secrets. And of course she reads it and it’s brilliant and he shows the book to Theo and he loves it, and probably loves her too, because who wouldn’t? She’s a sweetie, and smart, and hilarious. But. But! Has Pete been carrying a torch for two decades? And waitaminnit, is she carrying one too?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In 2003, Kutcher starred in My Boss’s Daughter and Just Married. In 2003, Witherspoon starred in Legally Blonde 2. They absolutely could’ve starred in Your Place or Mine in 2003. It also exists in the same conceptual ballpark as The Holiday.

Performance Worth Watching: Zoë Chao is skilled at being the deliverer of zingers in many supporting roles. Who wouldn’t love to see her headline a comedy?

Memorable Dialogue: Pete and Deb discuss one of his past flings:

Deb: What happened with Minka? She seems like your type. She’s so silky and sleek.

Pete: She’s not an otter.

Sex and Skin: PG-13 kissyface and light straddling.

Our Take: Witherspoon and Kutcher are in their forties now, and there’s something comforting about watching them play middle-aged people who don’t look particularly middle-aged, live in absurdly lovely Movie Homes, say moderately amusing things and have problems that can be solved so easily. Actually, on second thought, there’s nothing comforting about it. F— these witty, attractive people and their clean, uncluttered, immaculately styled homes and their humdrum interpersonal not-really-crises. They’re a quarter-millimeter from infinite happiness, and all the movie has to do is nudge them that quarter-millimeter into eternity. There’s nothing challenging here, for us or for Deb and Pete. If you really want to challenge all involved parties, give the characters a medical insurance EOB to decipher, or a leaky roof, or a kid who won’t stop playing Fortnite. Ol’ Deb and Pete are so soft, a stubbed toe would put them into a hellish existential spiral.

Which isn’t to say Your Place or Mine isn’t a perfectly enjoyable movie. It absolutely bullseyes the nostalgia zones of anyone who wore their DVDs of A Lot Like Love or No Strings Attached or Sweet Home Alabama or, uh, Overnight Delivery down to bare plastic. It’s simultaneously dated and timeless, a throwback to an era when this type of movie littered theaters and Blockbusters like pennies on the floor of your Corolla. They’re novel now, relative rarities among modern comedies, which tend to veer toward overt earnestness and high-concept. These rom-coms are just about Life, which is absolutely not life, and that’s OK, because escapism doesn’t necessarily require trips to outer space or the Rock cocking an eyebrow.

So. Your Place or Mine is glossy fluff, a cotton-candy movie that’s sweet in the moment but disintegrates in seconds. The principal stars are nice to look at and have decent chemistry, the climax is telegraphed from the very moment you read the one-line premise and the situations are back-of-your-hand familiar. Nobody’s reinventing the rom-com here. This one’s just reaffirming the tropes. 

Our Call: Your Place or Mine asserts that 2003 wasn’t so bad, and it’s almost convincing! STREAM IT, but you’d be wise to not draw comparisons to neo-rom-com faves like Palm Springs or Always Be My Maybe. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.