Your Place or Mine
NetflixIn their ongoing attempt to have endless new releases that can hit the zeitgeist and convince subscribers to renew their plans, Netflix of course is going to try and capture eyes ahead of the Valentine's Day holiday with their biggest release this year being Aline Brosh McKenna's Your Place or Mine. Starring the dynamic duo of Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher who play long-time friends who swap houses for a week and learn that there might be potential for a deeper relationship between themselves, Your Place or Mine is, at best, an average romantic comedy that plays into tired cliches while also missing the key factors that can make the genre so special.
From framing alone, Your Place or Mine features questionable decision making with nearly the entire feature seeing Debbie (Witherspoon) and Peter (Kutcher) separated. Outside of a brief opening and the occasional FaceTime call shared between the pair, there is little to no time spent actually building their connection or chemistry. Your Place or Mine is a film that entirely relies on its ability to tell you that there is love and chemistry present without actually being able to showcase it. This is a wildly misguided take for the film to have as not only does the final product feel hollow and boring, but the actual center romance struggles to find any sense of weight or authenticity.
Replacing the actual romance of the romantic comedy. Your Place or Mine features incredibly dull side plots that feel neither rewarding nor enjoyable. In Los Angeles, Peter takes care of Debbie's son Jack (Wesley Kimmel) who is struggling to find friends or freedom against his overbearing mother. Peter tries his best to show Jack how to make friends and try new things, but struggles as he begins to realize the trivial nature of some of his own relationships. Across the country in New York City, Debbie finds an unpublished novel written by Peter and decides to act like his editor and try to get the book published. Neither of these plots are that engaging or worthwhile with the eventual lesson being learned in each being obvious from the start with the film doing nothing to transcend expectations. Other filler plots used to accommodate the strangely long 111-minute runtime include Steve Zahn playing Debbie's strange garden-obsessed neighbor Zen, Debbie attending accounting classes, and Peter showing Jack the joys of eating out and watching Alien.
This speaks to a bigger issue within Your Place or Mine, the absolute lack of depth and purpose within the film. While it is easy to make jokes about Netflix originals and their lack of soul or craft, films like Your Place or Mine defines itself with this cheap identity. There is no new thesis or depth to the film and the plot is meaningless filler comedy that adds as hollow of morals as it can to give the appearance of substance. No one, both behind and in front of the camera, is giving inspired efforts with every piece of the film simply going through the motions to cash a paycheck and deliver a project with the presence of romance to capitalize on a holiday. Your Place or Mine is a shadow of what film actually can be and is yet another Netflix Original that will either waste 2-hours of an audience or get instantly lost in the depths of the Netflix algorithm.
