Once upon a time—okay, 2010—a movie came out by the name of How Do You Know that was a romantic comedy about a woman who, feeling out of sorts after being cut from the U.S.A. softball team because she has aged out, struggles to make sense of her new life and the romantic triangle she has become involved in with a suave baseball pro and an unassuming guy who is about to become the fall guy for financial shenanigans at the corporation he works for. The film seemed to have everything going for it—it was written and directed by the always-reliable James L. Brooks, a top-flight cast featuring Reese Witherspoon as the softball player, Owen Wilson as the pro, Paul Rudd as the schnook and Jack Nicholson as the schnooks’s dad, a cad who not only runs the corporation but is perfectly comfortable with letting his son take the fall for the malfeasance, and a more-than-healthy budget—but for whatever reason, audiences and most critics failed to respond to its offbeat charms and it went down as a major, if largely undeserved bomb, one which has become all the more notorious since Brooks hasn’t directed another film since and, barring some miracle, it will also go down as the conclusion of Nicholson’s storied career as well.
And yet, for all of that film’s undeniable flaws, it contained the things that one generally hopes to find in their rom-coms—likable actors, engaging characters, sprightly dialogue and undeniable chemistry between the leads. That is more than I can say about most recent rom-coms and that is especially true of Witherspoon’s latest dip into the genre, Your Place or Mine. As dismal and dated as the title suggests, this is the kind of project that Witherspoon could have easily tossed in the reject pile in the wake of Election (1999) as being way too far beneath her talents. Instead, she both stars in it and serves as one of its co-producers, which means that either her crap detector needs a fresh set of batteries or she was paid enough money to put notions of taste and shame to the side, at least temporarily. The result is a film so painfully bad that I almost want to send links to it to everyone still using How Do You Know as a punchline so that they can see for themselves what a truly terrible rom-com looks like.
The film revolves around Debbie (Witherspoon) and Peter (Ashton Kutcher), who had a one-night stand years ago that, although a failure from a romantic perspective, led to a lasting friendship that has managed to continue on even after Peter unexpectedly moved from California to New York City, where he put away his dreams of being a writer to become a high-paid corporate consultant with a personal life as sterile as his lavish apartment. Back on the West Coast, Debbie is over-protectively raising her young son Jack (Wesley Kimmel)—in the realm of helicopter parents, she is Blue Thunder—while paying the bills working at a local school (which, judging from the size of her house, must pay extremely well). She gets a chance to move on to a job closer to her skill set that requires going to New York for a week of statistical analysis classes and a big test and decides to take a chance for once. If nothing else, the trip will give her a chance to catch up with Peter as she will be staying with him for the week.
Disaster strikes at the last second when the friend charged with taking care of Jack for the week has to go out of town and Debbie is left in the lurch. Peter then proposes that she come out anyway and stay at his place and he will come out there and take care of Jack. She finally agrees to do it and, once arriving in New York, begins a madcap week that involves classwork, meeting and bonding with Peter’s occasional booty call (Zoe Chao) and meeting Theo (Jesse Williams), the hunky heartthrob head of her favorite publishing company. Back in California, Peter bonds with Jack and endeavors to let him do all the things that Debbie would normally forbid, ranging from watching Alien to trying out for a youth hockey team. During this time, he begins to recognize that being an emotionally reserved loner with a big bank account and no personal attachments is not as awesome as it sounds. Meanwhile, Debbie makes a couple of discoveries of her own that complicate things for her as well—namely that Peter may not have completely given up his writing dreams and that his feelings towards her may not be as platonic as he claims.
The gimmick of the film—and it barely qualifies as one at that—is that for virtually the entire running time, the two stars are never in the same place at the same time. Oh, they are on the screen together via numerous split-screen shots that are clearly meant to remind viewers of similar sequences in the Rock Hudson-Doris Day classic Pillow Talk (1959), but that is about it. I can only presume that by doing this, writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna (making her directing debut after penning a string of crummy romantic comedies, including the less-than-immortal Three to Tango and the even-worse 27 Dresses) is trying to give the film an old-fashioned feel. The difference is that Pillow Talk had two stars so loaded with charm and personal chemistry that even when they weren’t actually on the screen together, it felt as if they were, not to mention moments of actual wit, a nice visual style and a breezy pace. These elements are nowhere to be found here, replaced by the utilization of the kind of worn-out genre tropes that even fans of the form must have hoped had been retired decades ago, right down to Debbie’s wacky next-door neighbor (Steve Zahn), who hopes to one day win her heart by constantly tending her garden (not a metaphor) in the hopes that she will finally notice him, or at least overlook his constantly displayed butt crack.
Those may be problems, to be sure, but the biggest flaw with Your Place or Mine is that I never believed any aspect of it for a single solitary moment, not even by typical romantic comedy standards in which whimsical contrivances are considered a feature and not a bug. I didn’t believe that these characters lived the lives that they did or behaved in the ways that they do here. I never believed that they read the books that they claimed to love. I didn’t believe in their stated personal ambitions or in the ways in which they found themselves settling when things didn’t go as planned. Most of all, I never believed for a single second in Debbie and Peter as either lifelong friends or potentially something more. There is just not a any moment of any real connection between the two leads—since you cannot believe that these two people would have ever spent any time at all together, let alone become the kind of friends who make time to call each other every day, it is impossible to care at all about whether they will get together or not. Of course, by keeping the two leads apart for the majority of the film, the hope was presumably that when they finally did share the same space together, the chemistry between the two would be so palpable so as to justify everything that had gone before it. A nice plan, but one somewhat subverted by the fact that when the big scene comes, Witherspoon and Kutcher strike so few sparks that it almost feels as if they are meeting for the very first time and are not especially comfortable doing so.
At one point, I thought about comparing Your Place or Mine to the kind of gooney romantic fare that plays around the clock on the Hallmark Channel. However, even given my admittedly limited working knowledge of their cinematic bill of fare, I know that such a comparison would be unfair because for as idiotic as those films are, they at least seem to know what their viewers are looking for and gives it to them in doses that are evidently satisfying to them. Outside of Witherspoon and Kutcher’s accountants, I cannot readily imagine anyone who could possibly come away from this film feeling satisfied and if such a person existed, I know I would not want to be stuck sitting next to them on an extended bus trip. Both stars are better than this utterly disposable junk and if they are lucky, it will, after a week or two of curious looks, disappear in to the ever-expanding morass of Netflix content and be quickly forgotten.
I guess what I am trying to say is—How Do You Know is better than you’ve heard and is definitely worthy of a second chance.