Your Place or Mine

Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher amiably dance through the romcom two-step as a pair of old friends who need a whole movie to figure out they've always been in love.

“Your Place or Mine” is unambitious but unobjectionable romcom fare from Netflix featuring two winsome stars getting on in years who give amiable performances, practically mugging for the camera. It’s what we’d call in the old days a popcorn movie — light, fluffy, entertaining, designed to be consumed and forgotten.

Like most romantic comedies of recent vintage, the central dynamic is two people who need a whole movie to discover the fact that they’re already deeply in love with each other. Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) and Peter (Ashton Kutcher) may set some sort of record for slow-burn delays, as they’ve been best friends for 20 years after an initial hook-up in their carefree 20s.

The interesting thing about “Your Place or Mine” is that, as you might discern from the title, the two characters spend almost the entire film in different locales. In this case, Peter jets to Los Angeles to watch over Debbie’s 13-year-old son, Jack (Wesley Kimmel), for a week while she’s taking an accounting course in the Big Apple and staying at his lavish condo.

Writer/director Aline Brosh McKenna, making her feature film directorial debut after a string of strong screenplays including “Cruella” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” earns points for taking on such a storytelling challenge. Even with the use of copious split screens for phone chats and video calls, it’s obviously a hindrance for the audience to become emotionally invested in a couple if they’re not physically present to stare dreamily into each other’s eyes.

Oh, they do, of course, eventually — a revelation that was serve as spoiler to exactly nobody.

Debbie has become a prototypical middle-aged single mom, perfectly content to go about in denim skirts and likening her love life to an old Western tumbleweed scene — lonely and dry. Jack is her entire world, and she is aiming to move up in her job in the accounting department of the local system by passing a certification course that, somehow in a post-pandemic 2023, is only available for one week in New York City.

(Meanwhile, I have a nephew who has a degree from a university he’s never visited.)

She needs the money, given that Jack is one of those kids who struggles to fit in and is allergic to everything. Although she owns a cute cottage house surrounded by an astonishing amount of land for L.A., with the abundant greenery attended to morning to night by Zen (Steve Zahn), a strange hippie-surfer type who apparently does this out of the kindness of his heart and the lack of anything better to occupy his time.

(Never mind that such a property in most Los Angeles neighborhoods would go for low- to mid-seven figures. Hollywood has always had a curious delusional inability to reconcile what the actual habitats of middle-class people look like.)

Peter is a super-successful marketing whiz who hops from client to client every few months, never stopping in one place too long. It’s the same way with his love life: he’s the classic cad who prefers to rent short-term over buying. As the movie opens, both his latest gig and fling are ending simultaneously after the six-month point, so Peter offers to fly out and watch over Jack while Debbie takes her course.

While navigating their new environs, each finds their own wing-woman. In L.A. Peter befriends Alicia (Tig Notaro), another school worker of indeterminate vocation who mostly just hangs around chugging coffee and offering acerbic commentary.

In New York, Debbie bumps into Minka (Zoë Chao), a saucy building neighbor who is one of Peter’s rotating troupe of hookup buddies. She takes Debbie under her wing and attempts to de-frump her, leading to an introduction to Theo (Jesse Williams), a dreamy book publisher.

All this leads to the discovery of a long-hidden novel manuscript Peter, once an aspiring writer, penned about his relationship with his father. You can put the rest of the pieces together yourself. Although I found it curious that Peter hides his secret book by placing a physical printout of it in a place normal people use frequently, as opposed to slapping it on a Google Drive somewhere.

(It’s continually funny to me that movies incorporate modern technology but with a 1950s mindset.)

Peter bonds with Jack over scary movies, unhealthy eating habits and hockey, and launches a scheme to help ingratiate the kid with some former friends who are freezing him out. Better advice would’ve been to find better friends.

Kutcher is charming and dashing, playing a guy who puts on a big front of how self-confident he is but mostly to hide crippling doubts about his worth as a human being. He often jokes that his friendship with Debbie is the only thing keeping him out of darkness — it’s funny because it’s true. Kutcher’s boyish face has some age to it now, and he wears it well.

Witherspoon is back in the perky girl-next-door mode that first made her a star, though her Debbie has taken some knocks in life and wised up. She does a good job of showing how being a parent can take over everything to the point you begin to forget the person you used to be.

Is “Your Place or Mine” anything more than a familiar two-step through romantic comedy tropes? It is not. But it’s fizzy, agreeable and fun.