Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” is the kind of movie that studios used to pump out several times a year in the halcyon days of the industry, when funny, complex films were made for adults to contend with instead of baby-brained slop that requires “turning their brains off” to enjoy. A locked-room chamber piece, a remake of the Spanish film “The People Upstairs” (2020), which itself was an adaptation of Cesc Gay’s stage play “Els veïns de dalt / Los vecinos de arriba,” “The Invite” is a fine dance floor for actors eager to strut, allowing them to rail and flail and simmer with and against one another. As the third directorial feature from Wilde, whose previous films include “Booksmart” (2019) and “Don’t Worry Darling” (2022), “The Invite” feels like an eager elongation of style through simplification, shrinking the scope of her lens to four people in a room talking, arguing, coupling and considering each other. Citing the works of Diane Keaton, who receives a loving tribute at the film’s end, along with iconic stage play adaptions like “12 Angry Men” (1957) and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1966) as direct inspirations, what Wilde is able to conjure in this pot-boiling interpersonal tête-à-tête is as honest as it is adventurous; a movie of human feeling forcibly uncorked and allowed to run rampant. This is a story about relationships, what their inherent purpose might be in a modern world, and how they can be recontextualized in a manner befitting the inherent prickliness of souls willingly welded together through legal and biological means. There is chaos in love, a give and take of expectations, missed opportunities, and reclamation; and that’s at the best of times. What “The Invite” intuits is that perhaps a chance to spice up the dull, yet palatable mundanity of a relationship may be, in fact, a spotlight shone on a canary long dead amid the twisting caverns of lives intertwined so tightly as to strangle instead of support. If people are flawed, then our sustained cohabitation would assuredly spoil the groundwater of passing years if allowed to fester sans introspection in hilarious, if often brutal, ways. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates once opined; so why should a marriage be any different?
“The Invite,” from a screenplay by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, follows Joe and Angela (Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde) amid the slow decomposition of their marriage. They argue as their primary form of communication; they keep little secrets from one another, and each is miserable and pines for a life they believe they squandered. But they have a 12-year-old daughter whom they both adore, and are trying to keep things together for her sake, though they would never admit that openly. Unbeknownst to Joe, Angela has invited their libertine upstairs neighbors, Pína and Hawk (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton), to a casual dinner. This incenses Joe, whose frustration toward his friendly, if intense, neighbors is exasperated by their habit of having loud, animalistic sex deep into the night, which keeps him awake and has become a topic of constant conversation between Angela and himself. In fact, it’s one of the few things they seem to be able to actually talk about while they themselves couldn’t be more physically or emotionally distant. The pair bicker loudly over the value of engaging with their amorous neighbors as Pína and Hawk arrive. A good face is plastered over their obvious acrimony, but the overly accepting and calm visitors seem to revel in the broiling hostility; they admit to enjoying the tension it brings to the evening. They have ulterior motives that will come to the fore in time, and in so doing unleash a whirlwind realization in both Angela and Joe; about who they are, about what they want, and about whether or not the life they find themselves in is worth the spit and vinegar forcibly collated to hold it all together.
As a filmmaker, Olivia Wilde seems to operate at her best when playing in the sandbox of direct adaptation, of literary source material and genre. Her first film, the rollicking and oddly subversive “Booksmart,” is a clear heir apparent to “Superbad,” which so happened to be co-written by Rogen, kindred films where high school outcasts force themselves to join in with the cool kids before going off to college. Yet there is a nuance that Wilde brings to the formula, a soft, stabbing truth massaged into the familiar beats of a high school set “one crazy night story”, fostering a pair of lovely central performances from Kaitlin Dever and Beanie Feldstein. This insight makes “Booksmart,” at least to this writer, the superior film. It’s not that Wilde is breaking new ground so much as she has a knack for finding and lensing a fresh perspective, a new translation of a well-trodden text that brings out precious gems of meaning previously unexhumed. The same can be said for “The Invite”, whose deftly choreographed emotional two-step between strangers, both married and otherwise, hints at a universal need for belonging, of feeling loved and seen for the person one is, not the role they inhabit. Flexing muscles surely honed from years acting on TV and movie screens, Wilde continually finds ways of escalating the ever-elongating distance between Joe and Angela, making them seem to exist in different galaxies even when standing mere feet from one another. It is rare to find a film as visually sumptuous, especially a modern comedy. By framing her subjects in doorways, voyeuristically through windows, in different focal lengths, or in mirrors that allow them to share the frame while ignoring or hiding from each other, Wilde creates intimacy that relates not person to person but from person to the audience. We sense a closeness, a familiarity, with Joe and Angela, a bridge which is also extended to Pína and Hawk as the film reaches its interpersonal conundrum/zenith. Wilde excels at seeing through the cloak that shields a person’s outward projections, at digging into the insecurity, fears, and untouched desires beneath. All four of our lead actors – Rogen, Cruz, Norton, and even Wilde herself – are allowed the space to exist, to breathe, to consider without the film ever becoming self-important or preachy. It’s prickly country that Wilde has chosen to march her actors through, and the barbs are not to be avoided so much as barreled through with reckless abandon. While “Don’t Worry Darling” felt like an ambitious swing with little substantive follow-through, “The Invite” is a return to form and a fine showcase of not only what makes her films so unique, but the kinds of movies we are in desperate need of celebrating.
“The Invite” is funny, which is not always the norm for these kinds of intimate stories, and its humor is both introspective and surprising. Comedy on the big screen has had its ups and downs over the past twenty years, with Rogen himself being at the forefront of a particularly potent run of male-centric, improv-laden comedies that made him a movie star. Yet, in the arms race to out-riff the competition, there has been a bit of a drought in terms of well-written, considered, and performed comedies that have something more to say than a simple high concept. That fodder has found its way to television, leaving moviegoing comedy fans to wither away on the vine. “The Invite,” a Sundance Film Festival darling, was itself made outside the studio system, allowing it space to explore and be more purposeful than its more corporately financed brethren. While it is a bit of a tightrope walk to consider “The Invite” an indie success, with four movie stars in front of the camera and one behind, the fact that this many known performers can come together for a film that is this earnest and laugh-inducing is a testament to what comedy can be when given the authority to sidestep the hits and play some jazz. There is a “twist” to the film, but the concept is not so much “high” as it is illuminating; a backboard that our characters can bounce off of to pleasurable, and ultimately, insightful results. “The Invite” dares to swim in the murky waters of sentiment, of people finding their way through life blind without a rope to tie them to safety. For all of Rogen and Wilde’s bickering or Cruz and Norton’s obtuse exoticism, it’s the final twenty minutes, where the jokes have run their course, and the film begins its descent, where its quiet purpose finds sure footing and emotional clarity. Life is endlessly hilarious when allowed to play out before us, and it can also be heartbreaking. That nexus point is where “The Invite” curls up and allows us to bask in it; an oddly comforting place of human understanding that is as humorous as it is relatable, forming, ironically, a perfect marriage.
“The Invite” is a simple and affecting comedy; the kind meant to chew over between fits of laughter, as much a mirror to ourselves as it is for our characters. It’s a strong showing from Wilde, whose eye for the soupier intricacies of human nature is where her talent as a filmmaker shows flashes of relatable brilliance; the finest kind of cinema and a grand time at the movies.
Accept the invite.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Invite” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place and The Broad Theater.
