Aline Brosh McKenna’s directorial debut, Your Place or Mine stars Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon in a brand new, yet unoriginal, take on the rom com genre. Kutcher and Witherspoon play best friends of 20 years who now live on opposite sides of the country, New York City and Los Angeles, respectively. As a favor to her, Kutcher’s character offers to switch houses with her and watch her son, played by Wesley Kimmel, for a week while she takes a class in NYC. The general plot is sufficient enough for a romcom, as is the romance, the comedy, the character development, the cinematography, and everything else. Practically nothing about this movie stands out to me as exceedingly good or bad, it’s all just fine.
While almost every aspect of this movie I would consider mediocre or average, there is one thing that is all over the place; the chemistry. It feels so random as to who plays well off of who and when they connect well with each other. Kutcher and Witherspoon are great together as friends, but as soon as they realize they love each other, it doesn’t work at all. Kutcher and Kimmel are great together, they’re probably the best part of the movie because of how wholesome they come across.
Kimmel and Witherspoon work at times, but not always. Tig Notaro, who plays Witherspoon’s best friend, ironically has no chemistry with her, but a ton of it with Kutcher. This continues with almost every character that interacts with more than one person. It seriously feels like they used a randomizer to decide who would work on screen together and it’s pretty jarring. As soon as there are two people that make you a little invested in the movie, the next scene will have two people that don’t work at all which puts you right back in a place of disengagement.
Outside of the distracting chemistry, really everything about the film is as par for the course as possible for a studio romcom. The comedic portions of the movie work well when Kutcher is in Los Angeles, and to the same degree, doesn’t when Witherspoon is in New York, so they cancel each other out in my eyes. The dialogue is mostly solid, but there are a few times where they give Kimmel some awkward sounding lines because they didn’t know how else to move the plot forward.
The romantic pieces work at times, but certainly not throughout the whole movie. Witherspoon and her love interest in New York, played by Jesse Williams, connect in a believable manner and Jesse Williams acts pretty well here. I’ve disliked Jesse Williams in everything I’ve seen him in up to this point, so I was pleasantly surprised with his performance. The acting in general is good enough to not be a detriment but nobody is doing anything of note either.
Final Thoughts
If you’re a big fan of rom coms, you may like this one more than me and I’d recommend giving it a shot, but if you aren’t, I wouldn’t have this be your first foray into the genre. Although the comedy and chemistry are wildly inconsistent, I think it works more often than it doesn’t so I ended up slightly liking this movie as a whole.
