The Invite
Directed by Olivia Wilde
Written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, based on The People Upstairs, written by Cesc Gay
Starring Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton
Classification 14A; 107 minutes
Opens in limited theatres July 3, nationwide July 10
Olivia Wilde plays high-strung party host Angela in The Invite, a sharp marriage comedy about two couples skirting each other’s boundaries over dinner. Married to Seth Rogen’s amusingly grouchy Joe, Angela moves through the room with tense, bunched-up shoulders, her head often craned toward her guests Piña and Hawk, played mischievously by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, respectively.
Angela’s eager to make an impression. She’s baking a soufflé and setting up a charcuterie board. She’s hoping Spaniard Piña will find the jamón appealing, and that the fancy new rug she rush-ordered will be adored by Hawk, a connoisseur of fine decor. She tells Hawk she just happened to find the rug at a flea market, trying to make all her exacting measures seem effortless. She’s convincing exactly no one.
Wilde’s character is not unlike Wilde, the director whose previous work includes the preening crowd-pleasing coming-of-age comedy Booksmart and the convoluted marriage thriller Don’t Worry Darling. She, too, can come off as eager to impress; her stylistic flourishes reek of effort while the contemporaneousness of her movies is spelled out in all caps.
We see that in The Invite’s carefully stage-managed tension and comedy, as two couples exhaust a lifetime’s worth of marriage problems over one evening in a single location. The camera exhaustively searches the space, a deluxe San Francisco condo, for all the interesting or instructive angles, isolating characters in every corner of the apartment and the frame, before they occupy and command the centre. The moves here are as calculated as the script, which tends to leave very little breathing room between gags and therapizing.
None of this substantially takes away from The Invite, which turns out to be both hilarious and surprisingly perceptive on issues that plague modern marriages. The movie’s flaws and shortcomings aren’t just tolerable, they can be endearing – like those of a partner in a lasting marriage – and perhaps even revealing, considering the proximity between Wilde and her character.
From left, Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton.Uncredited/The Associated Press
The director is coming out of a very publicized breakup with Jason Sudeikis. She’s already expressed a sort of exorcism of that pain through her art. That personal touch is felt, even in a screenplay written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, who adapted the Spanish-language film The People Upstairs, which itself is adapted from the stage.
As with the original, the more tightly wound couple, in this case Angela and Joe, host the neighbours from upstairs. Piña is a therapist and sexologist. Cruz plays her as effortlessly sensual, whether she’s relaxing into a joint or standing 10 toes down to make her points on all things sex and relationships. Piña is the counterweight to Angela, and all her anxiety; just as Cruz’s performance is the furthest thing from the studied mannerisms in Wilde’s.
Norton’s Hawk, a former firefighter, is both suave and entitled, the kind of guy who puts on a show of empathy and emotional intelligence just to infiltrate people’s comfort zones.
All Angela and Joe really know about their neighbours is that they tend to have alarmingly loud sex, which piques the couple’s curiosity. Angela comes right out and admits to being obsessed with Piña’s orgasms, which she hears in all their glory through their ceiling. Joe, a former musician who is bitter about his current position as an associate professor at a music academy, is more than a little disturbed by it all.
Joe’s also feeling ambushed by the evening Angela has planned. She insists she gave him advanced notice. He doesn’t remember it and seems to resent the effort she’s making for the new guests. He even threatens to bring up his issues with the loud banging and moaning from upstairs when Piña and Hawk are over, either out of spite or genuine concern for what their 12-year-old daughter Maggie can hear.
Maggie is at a sleepover, so there’s freedom on this particular night when it comes to laying it all out on the table. That, of course, is where so much of the comedy is borne from, along with the second invite, or proposition, that really gets the night going. I won’t spell out where this goes, but anyone who’s seen the trailer can gather what’s hiding in plain sight.
The Invite stretches plausibility because of how fast things move, and how far these characters are willing to go over the course of a single night, as far as pushing each other’s boundaries and probing each other’s relationships go. And yet, I can’t help but appreciate how much ground is covered, how many of the issues plaguing my own relationships and those around us are reflected in the sparring between this uniformly excellent cast. This is the rare movie, for instance, that at least addresses the wide-ranging effects of perimenopause, the way women’s sexual health isn’t prioritized in the medical field and the effects these things have on relationships.
It’s also a movie willing to complicate so much of its own comedy. Rogen, revealing new layers as a comic performer, tends to get the most laughs as Joe, with gags that typically call out or mock Angela’s high-strung behaviour or performative displays. But there’s an emotional violence in that comedy; in the way Joe uses humour to disguise self-pity and resentment; the way he can see through his wife but is also deeply incurious about what she needs.
These are some of the surprising revelations in The Invite. The payoffs it comes by honestly, if not effortlessly.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the name of the daughter character in The Invite.