When you become an adult, or the age that we tend to agree is the point that your adult form is fully reached…no, not eighteen, your brain hasn’t even fully developed by then…let’s generously say it’s about ten years after that, when you’re about twenty-eight or even thirty, there’s a strong possibility that you will begin to expand your social circle beyond the people you knew in school. It’s a difficult thing to make new friends, and it gets even harder the older you get. Try being forty and going to social gatherings. There are all these open questions floating around in your head: will we have anything in common? What’s the conversation going to be like? What are their interests/politics/religious beliefs? Are they big drinkers? Am I even in the mood for this?
I’ve been fortunate as I start to creep into middle age that my partner and I have lucked into an incredible social circle, one that feels like an extension of my own family, and the opportunities we’ve had to meet other adults that are brand-new to us have been fully rewarding ones. If anything, I probably came across as the brash, overtalking know-it-all that I fear being stuck in a room with.
But I can see a world where this sort of thing is so much tougher, where you’ve insulated yourself into a tight little family unit, and the idea that anyone could breach that – especially on an evening where things are already fraught, exhausting, etc – could approach catastrophe. That’s where Olivia Wilde‘s new film The Invite lives in large part, though as it moves through its corners and hallways, it reveals a deeper intimacy.
(I just wanted to take a quick parenthetical to say that I recognize this movie lands with a little baggage attached and some level of lost trust from its audience where Wilde as a filmmaker is concerned. After the excitement around Booksmart died down, she followed it up with the SF-nal Don’t Worry Darling, which was waylaid with a ton of gossipy nonsense that was poised to sink that movie before it ever came out. Having seen it a year later, it played more as a fascinating miss than anything that should act as a career-killer. But sadly, the extremities within which we live don’t allow for nuance…and now for the rest of the story…)
The Invite, the fifth(!!) remake of the Spanish original entitled The People Upstairs, is one of those tiny ensemble films that in a vacuum you might think would be better set for the stage than something begging for the big screen treatment. Films like Carnage and Mass come to mind as immediate comparators, a quartet cast with a dialogue-driven script to keep things moving. Bluntly, as respectable as both of those films are, neither quite break out from the distracting notion that you’d rather just see them played out live. More than anything, this is probably the best takeaway that can be shared around Wilde’s third directorial effort; the combo of her work behind the camera, the blocking of scenes, the welcome intrusion of Devonte’ Hynes’ score at perfect moments, and art direction that feels deeply lived in despite the minimal scale, at no point does the audience feel hemmed in by the concept.
Thankfully, “not feeling like a play” isn’t The Invite‘s only virtue. Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) are in bad shape romantically. Joe is in a job he hates, his rockstar dreams having gone up in smoke, Angela sits around the house bored, her only passion being the design of the (very large) condo they inherited from Joe’s parents. That this is another ongoing point of shame for Joe hums in the background of the character like a not-so-subtle subtext. When the film kicks off, Joe, hobbled by backpain and in a particularly sour mood, comes home to find Angela a whirling dervish of preparation. She’s invited the upstairs neighbors, Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for dinner and drinks. The same neighbors who they can hear having extremely loud sex in the middle of the night, another bee in Joe’s bonnet. An oversexed pair and a buttoned-up, resentful one are thus forced into proximity, and well, you get the sense of what might happen.
To put a finer point on it, everything about these neighbors plays a stark contrast to Angela and Joe’s life experience. Where Joe is the male breadwinner at his subpar music conservatory gig, Pina is seemingly the main provider as a sex therapist. Joe and Angela have an (off-screen) daughter, while Pina and Hawk do not, and have little interest in it. And while Angela’s day to day is less than satisfactory, getting her biggest kicks out of interior design treasures on Facebook Marketplace, Hawk is a former firefighter chasing his passion for massage therapy and antique rugs. Joe and Angela also haven’t had sex in a long time, a detail the film keeps circling back to like it’s the one piece of evidence that explains everything else.
The Invite plays to the most extreme version of just how badly this kind of hang-out can go. From the neighbors arriving while the other couple is in the middle of a fight, and acknowledging that fact, to various revelations about just HOW open Pina and Hawk are in their coupling, and the further opening of wounds between Joe and Angela that no broadening of their respective horizons is going to paper over.
All of that to say though, it’s also very funny. This kind of material is generally more the grounds for stark drama, but what Wilde and company pull off approaches comedy of manners. The ill-fit of these two couples creates the opportunity for ribald material, especially where the more (sexually) conservative Joe plays a bit of an everyman role to the things he’s being forcibly exposed to. Rogen’s always at the ready comedic chops are put to expert use here, our audience howled at some of his reaction lines, but as the night goes on (fully in realtime, by the way) the viewer impression of Joe undergoes an evolution. Yes, Hawk and Pina’s swinging lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but Joe is also just kind of a resentful asshole. Not to say Angela is world’s better, whose moods approach manic nightmare at points, but in bad relationships, the worst aspects of ourselves always come out.
There’s also a possible read in that Pina and Hawk don’t exist at all, that they’re an extension of the desires and frustrations our married protagonists feel now fully at their wits’ end. Angela wants to be more sexually validated, wants a husband that takes interest in the expression of her art, which takes the form of how she’s shaping the look of their home. Joe wants someone he can smoke a joint and listen to music with in his office, which acts like a shrine to what’s left of his own external passions. She welcomes the idea of a screaming orgasm in their living space; he’s the one banging on the door, shouting for this intrusion to end. It may be the key to unlocking the whole thing. Or it’s just a story of two completely incompatible couples and the dissolution of one marriage in the face of a very fiery, burning bright opposing force.
Either way, it’s a good time and a nice bounce-back for Wilde. Not that she ever really needed it.