Your Place or Mine

Valentine's Day has forced many of us to mourn not only the sad state of our love lives, but the even sadder state of romantic comedies. After a clear shortage, the streamer-driven 90-minute avalanche of meet-cuties was certainly consistent, but consistently underwhelming. There is such laziness. These movies are pumped out by half-sleeping writers and directors and seem to focus on other things.

You might naively expect a little more from Reese Witherspoon's return to both genre and film. This is her first starring role in six years since another romantic comedy, Home Again. But while Netflix's insane milk toast "Your Place or Mine" pairing her with Ashton Kutcher is as memorable as most of the multis we've spooned up lately, Wither Much more disappointing given the involvement of Spoon and writer-director Aline Brosh. McKenna. While McKenna did lump us with both I Don't Know How She Does It and the remake of Annie, she also wrote the smart and charming scripts for 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada and the frustratingly under-seen Morning Glory and co-created the excellent and often daringly subversive Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It's rather baffling then that she would make this her directorial debut, something so edgeless and unspecific with only glimpses of the wit and warmth we've seen from her work before.

The plot strings together familiar elements from romcoms past:

the best friends who might actually be soulmates in disguise from When Harry Met Sally, the big star pairing who only spend one scene together throughout the movie from Sleepless in Seattle and the house swap from The Holiday, a not uninteresting pot of ingredients to be stirred but one that remains stuck at room temperature until the end. An early red flag lands before we've seen a thing:

the Gwen Stefani and Akon song The Great Escape leads an opening scene from 2003, one that's littered with bits of on-screen text telling us just how very 2003 it all is (trucker hat – check) as Witherspoon and Kutcher's characters have a drunken one-night stand. Not only was The Great Escape released three years later but this gimmicky flourish is then abandoned until the very end. Coupled with a rushed intro that doesn't get enough of the character's initial dynamics, the movie starts off at a worrying point.

We're soon in the present with Witherspoon's uptight single mom living in L.A. and her date-turned-best friend caddyman of Kutcher around town in Brooklyn. Seeing them stay home together for a week so she can take college courses and he can take care of his son.

For a while, Witherspoon seemed like she was finally back on Earth after years of sailing in airplane movies. In her early work, the daring young actor acted without fear or coercion, and in dark and challenging films such as Freeway, Election, American Her Psycho, Best of Her Laid Her Plans, and Pleasantville, she was able to bring audiences together. As was pushing myself and us. 

The well-deserved success of 2001's adorable crowd-pleasing Legally Blonde slowly kept her in cute mode, cast and desecrated, and cemented as America's darling. It was her 2014 adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's Wild that brought her back from her abyss, a reminder of what she could and could do. But it was short-lived, as she now spends most of her time on Apple's ridiculously badass hate watch, The Morning Show. A hit and the kind of unforgettable fluff she would have had about a decade ago.

Not only is it frustrating to see her stuck in nervous helicopter mom mode again (especially if it's written without any real texture or detail), it's also the most boring gender stereo imaginable for a movie. It's also frustrating to see you clinging to type. She likes to cook! He likes to womanise! A far more interesting version would have seen the roles reversed, him as the clingy dad and her as the commitment-phobe. There are brief flashes of something more interesting in general, and adult, at play here – Kutcher's playboy is a recovering alcoholic, Witherspoon's mother was a heavy drinker, their friendship has been tested in difficult ways – suggestions that perhaps the script was a little bit more emotionally complex at one point. But it's all been sanded down to nothing and what could have felt at least loosely grounded quickly turns into silly cartoon with two bland and mostly unimpeachable leads supported by absurd one-note characters played to the hilt by Zoe Chao and Steve Zahn as if they were in a kids' movie. Even as glossy run-of-the-mill formula, it's never even close to being as funny or romantic as it needs to be, devoid of fizzy one-liners and hampered by the pair struggling to muster up chemistry during phone conversations that never feel as lived-in as they would for friends with such extensive history.