Valentine’s Day compels many of us to bemoan not just the sorry state of our love lives but also the even sorrier state of the romantic comedy, a genre given a recent rebirth that’s still in need of a jolt back to life. After a distinct dearth, the streamer-led avalanche of 90-minute meet-cutes has certainly been consistent but it’s also been consistently underwhelming, inoffensively so perhaps but also increasingly aggravating to those of us who fondly remember the best of them. Even without expecting a total wheel reinvention, there’s a laziness that niggles – it’s as if these movies are being pumped out by writers and directors who are half-asleep, their focus elsewhere.
One might naively expect a little more from Reese Witherspoon’s return to both the genre and to film in general, her first leading role in six years since another romantic comedy, Home Again. But Netflix’s maddeningly milquetoast Your Place or Mine, which pairs her with Ashton Kutcher, is just about as forgettable as most of the mulch we’ve been spoon-fed of late but considerably more disappointing given both the involvement of Witherspoon and writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna. While McKenna did lump us with both I Don’t Know How She Does It and the remake of Annie, she also wrote the smart and charming scripts for 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada and the frustratingly under-seen Morning Glory and co-created the excellent and often daringly subversive Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It’s rather baffling then that she would make this her directorial debut, something so edgeless and unspecific with only glimpses of the wit and warmth we’ve seen from her work before.
