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Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher and the screenwriter (and first-time director) Aline Brosh McKenna every have a long time of expertise making hit romantic comedies. So it’s all of the extra confounding that their newest, “Your Place or Mine,” is as phony and flat as a store-bought valentine pressured on each child in school. Witherspoon and Kutcher play Debbie and Peter, longtime friends who shared a sole night time of ardour 20 years in the past earlier than settling right into a bicoastal greatest friendship. Why haven’t these codependent singletons gotten again collectively? “She’s … her and I’m … me?” he sputters. His reply sums up the laborious pondering that went into this script.
A gap flashback to Debbie and Peter’s earlier hookup is the movie’s comedic peak. Brosh McKenna factors out the onscreen 2003 signifiers: trucker hats, flat-ironed hair and sufficient layered shirts to show Witherspoon right into a matryoshka doll. There’s additionally, in fact, Witherspoon and Kutcher themselves, who spent that 12 months taking pictures separate rom-coms, hers with Luke Wilson and his with Tara Reid and Brittany Murphy. Previous the intro, they’re saved aside right here, too. As an alternative, their characters swap houses, forcing the 2 stars to squander their breezy familiarity with one another on separate sides of cellphone conversations and split-screen bubble baths.
This Netflix manufacturing is banking on nostalgic good will for curiosity clicks. Folks puttering out and in of the room folding laundry can relaxation simple that there are few essential plot factors to overlook — and those that exist are inclined to get repeated at the very least twice.
Peter, for instance, is a Manhattan advertising guide with dedication issues. Early on, he breaks up together with his newest girlfriend on the six-month mark; in his subsequent scene, he has a near-identical dialog together with his newest company purchasers. (The purchasers take it tougher.) Debbie, a risk-averse single mom in Los Angeles, is pilloried with recommendation from one pal (Tig Notaro) — “Get your diploma, discover a man, then come dwelling and redo your kitchen” — and escapes solely to instantly collide with a second pesky pal (Rachel Bloom), who tacks on that the self-sacrificial mum or dad must also pursue her dream job as a e book editor.
The pacing of those scenes feels as if we’re trapped in a spaceship airlock and may solely faintly keep in mind what pure life felt like again dwelling on Earth. It solely takes a squint to see that Debbie’s lovable foibles — guidelines scribbled on Submit-it notes caught everywhere in the home, an insistence that her overprotected 13-year-old son (Wesley Kimmel) is allergic to every little thing from grass to enjoyable — would, in actuality, demand an intervention and, maybe, a prognosis of Munchausen by proxy. However nobody on this film is taking part in something close to a human being, though Kutcher sometimes resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.
The film’s sincerity will be measured by how flippantly it disposes of its love rivals. Steve Zahn suffers probably the most indignities as a tech millionaire who retired to backyard Debbie’s yard professional bono, whereas Jesse Williams’s charming literary writer by no means will get an opportunity to place up a good battle. As for Minka (Zoë Chao), Peter’s ex, a marvelously droll narcissist by some means keen to drop her entire big-city life to assist a stranger get her groove again, she might not win the man, however she steals all of her scenes.
Your Place or Mine
Rated PG-13 for robust language and suggestive materials. Working time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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