Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Netflix
Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher recently went viral for their lack of chemistry at the premiere of their new Netflix romantic comedy, Your Place or Mine. The pair stood a foot apart from each other, lopsided smiles splashed across their faces, looking like a pair of middle schoolers who just exited a closet after a Seven Minutes in Heaven session spent entirely talking about the weather and a mean gym teacher. There were no sparks between them, clearly. But, hey, at least they were actually in the same room, something Your Place or Mine completely fails to do.
The new rom-com—which is devoid of all charm, charisma, and comedy—sticks its two stars in two cities 3,000 miles apart: New York and Los Angeles. Because of this major physical gap, there’s actually more chemistry present in the red carpet photos than there is in the film itself. You’d have a more fun time scrolling through some of the better photos (yes, they look friendly in a few) than you would watching L.A. resident Debbie (Witherspoon) and New Yorker Peter (Kutcher) play phone tag for nearly two hours.
Debbie and Peter, who first met and hooked up in Los Angeles around two decades ago, are a byproduct of the Nora Ephron school of thought. They are friends who are in love, a la When Harry Met Sally, but they never see each other in person, communicating through buzzes and beeps like Tom and Meg in You’ve Got Mail. They didn’t stay together after that first night because—well, it’s so predictable that it’s pointless to regurgitate. Peter got scared of commitment, and by the time he came to his senses, Debbie was already with the man who’d become the father of her child, Jack (Wesley Kimmel).