Review: The Invite

Director: Olivia Wilde

Stars: Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton

Given the critical drubbing that her last directorial effort Don’t Worry Darling received – not to mention it’s bizarrely storied press tour – you’d have forgiven Olivia Wilde for receding from that kind of limelight ever again. Well, way to clap back against your naysayers. Wilde has evidently regrouped and reconsidered where her strengths lie, both as a director and a performer, and then chosen a project that suits her respective hats. The Invite is the result of these efforts. As a career-saver it’s a shrewd film, to be sure, but still an impressive one.

A remake of Cesc Gay’s Spanish 2020 flick The People Upstairs (working from a wittily reconstituted script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack), The Invite is Back-to-Basics 101. First and foremost, it’s An Actors’ Piece. Four principals. (Mostly) one location. Talky, character driven work in a contained and controllable environment. On a technical level, then, relatively safe. Miles from the big swings of her derailed sci-fi yarn. It’s effectively a play transposed to screen, though Wilde manages to make it not feel like that, thanks to a canny approach to blocking and framing that uses the geography of her space to inform her characters; to elucidate emotional distance, or to accentuate closeness. It has an old, ‘New Hollywood’ feel, that of a melancholic intellectual exercise. But one that’s been given licence to feel and be funny, and be flirty, too. While it doesn’t go begging for that nostalgia, it’s there, and potent. Enough for me to say right now at this remove, Oscar’s going to remember it come January. There’ll be nominations.

Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde) are married and in a rut, living in the recently renovated and handsomely decorated San Francisco apartment that Joe inherited from his parents. He’s a pot smoking ball of anger and insecurities that he masks with humour. She’s frustrated and trapped which manifests in the neurotic need to control. He teaches music at a less-reputable conservatory. She… anyway. Joe returns from work one evening with his back once more complaining only to discover that they’re having guests to dinner; an invite Angela makes clear he has ignored and forgotten. Their visitors will be the amorous neighbours from the apartment upstairs – Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz) – whose early-hours raucous love-making has become a bone (pun intended) of contention for Joe and Angela. Our couple’s predisposition to petty bickering already tells us a lot about the state of their marriage. It’s fortunate that daughter Maggie is at a sleepover this night.

Throughout its opening act The Invite mines – with itchy success – the nervousness of playing host. Even while Angela has sort of tricked and trapped Joe into the evening’s social mandate, she’s afluster at the prospect of any element showing up a certain facade of happiness and preparedness that exists in her mind (something only exasperated by Joe’s total ambivalence to the evening’s “success”). Wilde visualises their disparity with something approaching choreography. It is rare, upfront, for the two actors to share a frame, and rarer still for them to be looking at one another. Wilde teeters on the cusp of over-egging here. Devonté Hynes’ tremulous cellos go from underscoring to over-scoring, and almost drown out the actors with their hypersensitivity (later Bizet’s “Habernara” from Carmen is worked in to more playful effect). Overwhelming is made a little too literal.

Good then that the mid-section finds such an effortless groove. The four actors take the smart material handed to them by Jones and McCormack and get to work spinning it into gold. The stilted exchanges, overshares and embarrassments that occur when Hawk and Piña do arrive tumble like a set of plates cascading out of a kitchen cabinet, but also act as a release valve that carries us through to what follows. Pairing off with their respective opposites for tours of the apartment, Joe and Piña find an immediate looseness that coasts on his ability to play the charming clown, while Angela eats up the praise and appreciation handed to her by Hawk, whose interest in her interior design is everything she’s ever wanted.

As the evening draws on, it grows clearer that the guests have an ulterior motive for their visit, and that this is an act of recon or scouting for the sexually liberated proposition to come. When The Invite hits this inevitable tipping point, it becomes a lively satire of American conservatism. Joe and Angela coo uncontrollably at the exotic exploits revealed to be living a hair’s breadth away from them, and are handed the keys to previously unimagined adventures. The energy grows hot and elastic. Plus there’s the way that Penélope Cruz says “my boobs?”. Lord have mercy. Throughout the material takes sparkly-eyed swipes at dreaded, mood-killing mansplainers, patriarchal dismissal of the perimenopausal and much more besides. Modern (largely) heteronormative gender dissonances are hit like a checklist of worthy targets.

Inevitably this pair of neurotics can’t simply follow-through and The Invite crosses over into it’s prefigured, emotionally exhausting third-act comedown, a vanquishing therapy session. But this is not to say that the back section disappoints exactly. It is here that each actor is furnished with their opportunity for a coup de grâce. But Jones, McCormack and Wilde are smart enough to realise that there comes a point when you’re done talking, done performing, and the film’s wordless capper sends us out with a ray of hope set within a frame that glows with optimism and intimacy.

Picking faves out of these four actors is tough. Rogen really nails Joe’s insecurity and, when the intent of the evening comes into focus for him, his gratitude and incredulity is genuinely sweet. Norton seems for all the world like he’s channelling James Cameron, and this might be the best he’s been in years. Wilde is big, but not too big, evocative of a character trapped like a bird. And Cruz is Cruz, yaknow? Impeccable. They make for a top-notch ensemble.

Wilde opens quoting her namesake Oscar. “One should always be in love… that is the reason one should never marry”; a quip that suggests an overall philosophy that The Invite doesn’t fully abide by. It isn’t quite bleak enough for that, and for all the romantics out there, that’s an instinct that also saves it. This is witty, well-crafted adult entertainment. Wilde has swiftly changed the conversation around her. Where she goes from here is anyone’s guess but the window is wide open.