Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher Try to Revive the Romcom With Zero Chemistry

He lives in New York, she in LA. She has a home, shared with her 13-year-old son, that feels remarkably homey: lived-in and warm and deliberately modest in size, helplessly convincing us of its innate coziness. He lives in a steely Brooklyn apartment with a view of Manhattan that’s furnished with a stove he’s never used, cutlery that’s never been opened, and a despairing lack of tchotchkes — there is not so much as a photo of himself or anyone he loves in plain sight. His books are organized by color (a crime); her decor amounts to a surplus of loving details. She is a single mother who’s already withstood the disappointment of divorce. He seems resigned to relationships that conform to a strict six-month term limit. Wouldn’t you know it: They’re made for each other.

Debbie and Peter, the romantic duo at the center of Aline Brosh McKenna’s Your Place or Mine (now streaming on Netflix), wouldn’t make good roommates, let alone functional, full-time romantic partners who’d have to cram themselves into a shared space with a teenage son and force compromises over how to organize their books and whether potted plants ought to be tossed outside with the other dirt. Played, respectively, by Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, Debbie and Peter are long-time friends. They hooked up just once, 20 years ago, but are still close enough that they talk to each other regularly on FaceTime, are open with each other about everything (save a couple of crucial, jealousy-inducing things), and are so committed to honoring their mutual affection that until the movie drops the punchline that they’re just friends, we’re urged to make the mistake of thinking they’re a couple. Maybe that’s on us — maybe a guy being so close to a woman, so excited to see her with no strings attached, no ulterior motive to get into her pants again, shouldn’t feel suspicious. 

But that’s the joke. Your Place or Mine gets its limited but unmistakable oomph from the problem that Debbie and Peter are, in their current arrangement, really good for each other — as supportive and loving and indispensable friends, if not lovers. Their respective personalities are convincing indications of what the other person lacks. She needs to be less uptight. He needs to be less of an irresponsible dick. They bring the better qualities out in each other and, clearly, they love each other. So why not finally make it happen? That’s the movie’s pull or, if you’re of a certain mind, its trap. Your Place or Mine offers us a full-blown case for reverting back to the anodyne safety and security of the familiar, no matter the substantial downsides. Each of these people (one more than the other, owing to a certain unevenness at the heart of the movie) has to choose between the genuine but uncertain chemistry that enters their lives — a real, tactile, tingly sexual spark — or the chance to return to their shared, multi-decade past, to the person that they know will never leave them because they’ve always already been there. It’s a choice that we grow to envy.

The plot is kooky but simple. Debbie’s headed to New York for a week-long seminar (she’s trying to abandon her love of the literary arts in favor of a more practical job that pays more), and it’s supposed to be an occasion for her and her bestie to reunite. Only something happens: Debbie winds up almost canceling her trip because her son’s sitter has to flake, and Peter, who loves her, owes her one, and has daddy issues to resolve, decides to do his friend a solid and fly to LA to watch her kid. He stays at her place; she stays at his, Wife Swap-style. He gets to meet her friends (including a Buddhist neighbor named Zen, played by Steve Zahn, and a fellow school parent played by Tig Notaro) and she gets to pal around with one of his exes (played by Zoë Chao).

It needs to be said outright that these parallel storylines are not equally interesting, even if they vaguely start out on equal terms. When Your Place or Mine opens, Debbie and Peter get the split-screened, made-for-each-other visual gags familiar from old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies, those cutely twinned shots of each of them lying in bed reading at the same time, bathing at the same time, ritualistically in sync in ways neither of them fully realizes. And then the backstories kick in and Your Place or Mine, which runs nearly two hours, gets distracted, pretending that it’s as worthwhile to watch Debbie chatting it up with Peter’s fab, New Yorkey ex as it is watching Peter try to play dad to Debbie’s perfectly well-adjusted teen. Much of this excess, on both sides, wastes time: We have an implausible romance to watch! But then the movie throws a wrench into the affair by way of temptation. Debbie meets a handsome book publisher, played by Jesse Williams, with whom she has real, flesh-and-blood chemistry: no split-screens here, only a flirtation (and then some) that finally gives us something more than warm feelings to root for. And Peter has an encounter with a woman he hasn’t seen in years, played by Shiri Appleby, who also makes the movie come alive — even if the movie doesn’t want to make it last.

It’s all a tell, because what’s dangerously clear from the start is that Witherspoon and Kutcher have no romantic, and certainly no sexual, chemistry. It’s screaming stay platonic. The awkward but somehow incredible thing about Your Place or Mine is the effort put into convincing us otherwise. Kutcher, bearing a youthful smile that makes him seem a little too green for these shenanigans, never strictly comes off as an irredeemable choice for a romantic partner, but he also never gets to be interesting, whereas Witherspoon gets to do what she does best. Here she is, look at her go: showing up to her seminar with a backpack and new school supplies, practically huffing the scent of a newly-sharpened pencil, being all wide-eyed and adorably game for the joys of life, being completely absent of any kind of cynicism. When she and Williams’s publisher get to prattle their way through a handful of cute scenes, the movie finally lands on something: a counterargument. Witherspoon, nearly to the movie’s detriment, sells us on the sexy appeal of this fresh alternative to her ongoing situation with Kutcher as, in the same moment, Kutcher’s storyline flails in search of something interesting to do. It’s a wonder we’re even pretending that the Debbie and Peter thing ought to automatically work out.

But it has to work out. That’s the movie. And Your Place or Mine is worth watching for that alone, this iron-willed commitment to the premise in full defiance of what the characters are actually giving us. Debbie and Peter can only convince themselves that they were made to be by being denied the pleasure of each others’ company. Their mutual pull into each other’s orbit, their drift toward the split-screened dividing line that regulates their relationship as this movie sees fit to define it, stirs up all kinds of fantasies of their oneness, finds echoes in their respective lives that can make the movie feel a bit like an OK Cupid questionnaire tallying up their skin-deep, mathematical compatibility. I’d put them at about 50%. But that’s what sort of hooks me on the movie: it’s pleasantly weird. Maybe it’d hit differently with actors who at least had some sexual spark. Or if the characters were older — maybe that’d make it easier to buy into the idea that these two people are already so sure of what they want out of life, so experienced in the ritual of being let down by more titillating flings and affairs, that settling down with someone familiar might make noble sense. Instead, Your Place or Mine is fascinatingly at odds with who these people are. It’s more entertaining for it, squaring a circle for our benefit, giving both actors a youthful glow that defies the middle-aged temptation to settle while ensuring us that this is exactly what will happen because it “should.” Cut out the extra layers of nothingness piling up in the margins and you’ve got the kind of surreal tension that only romantic comedies, that dying but not dead genre, can offer: a case being made for romantic love, even when it doesn’t exist.