Smart, funny SF-set dramedy skewers long-term relationships
That actress/director Olivia Wilde’s new film The Invite feels like a stage play is not a coincidence. With the help of comedy screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (2012’s Celeste and Jesse Forever), Wilde has remade a 2020 Spanish film called The People Upstairs, which itself is based on a play of the same name. Even if you don’t know that source material, Wilde’s picture might remind you of a more classic American play: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Equally as uncomfortable, but infinitely more funny, The Invite is a terrific showcase for its four leads.
As in Albee’s famous story, The Invite centers on two couples and the roiling dysfunction and secrets that both bond and threaten them. Seth Rogen is Joe, a San Francisco high school music teacher lamenting the passing of his youthful rock band days. Wilde directs herself as Joe’s wife Angela, a stay-at-home mom with an interest in interior design. Neither seems particularly happy with their day-to-day existence, even though they’re living in the plush Pacific Heights apartment that Joe grew up in.
In contrast, Joe and Angela’s upstairs neighbors, firefighter Hawk (Edward Norton) and therapist Piña (Penélope Cruz), seem much more in touch with their feelings, their sexuality, and each other. When Angela invites the pair over for dinner, much to Joe’s initial dismay, long repressed cracks in the couples’ relationships begin to reveal themselves, with results both hilarious and cringeworthy.
Rogen flexes his dramatic chops here, skillfully oozing discontent and malaise as the emotionally burned out Joe. Wilde’s Angela is similarly frustrated, and the pair is credible as a couple whose passion for life and each other has settled into something routine at best and resentful at worst. Norton and Cruz are excellent as well, and Norton delivers an unexpectedly moving monologue with startling depth and rawness.
But while the film has its share of intense and serious moments, make no mistake: the picture is a first-rate dramedy, and there are as many laugh-out-loud moments as there are disquieting interludes. Without giving too much away, the film’s title refers not only to the dinner invite Joe and Angela extend to Hawk and Piña, but also to a different type of invitation that Hawk and Piña extend to Joe and Angela. Watching how that invitation plays out–and Joe and Angela’s differing reactions to it–makes up the heart of the film, and also delivers its biggest surprises and laughs.
Wilde and her cast have created a fly-on-the-wall look at the inner workings of marriage, commitment, and fidelity, and the fact that what we witness rings so true may be why we’re so discomfited. The film’s ending, too, smartly leaves much open to interpretation, and whether you view it as hopeful or pessimistic might reflect your honest feelings about long-term relationships. Wilde opens the film with a quote from another Wilde: 19th century playwright Oscar: “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.” After watching The Invite, you’ll be left musing on that nugget for a good long while.
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The Invite is currently playing, including at the AMC Metreon, AMC Kabuki, Landmark Opera Plaza, and the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco, the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville, the Landmark Piedmont, Grand Lake, and Regal Jack London in Oakland, the Rialto Elmwood in Berkeley, the Orinda Theater in Orinda, and the Cinemark Century theaters in Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill.
