I think Olivia Wilde had a whole lot riding on The Invite.
After the scandal that surrounded Don’t Worry Darling followed the movie’s own cool critical and commercial reception; whether or not you believe either of those things were entirely warranted, it punctured the hype around Wilde as a director that had been on the rise since her debut, Booksmart. Her third feature, The Invite, adapted from the movie Spanish-language Sentimental by Cesc Gray, narrows the scope of her focus down to just two couples: Joe and Angela (Seth Rogen and Wilde), parents whose relationship has been in slow, steady decline for years, and Pína and Hawk (Penélope Cruz and Ed Norton), their sexually-adventurous upstairs neighbours who have been taking more than a neighbourly interest in them of late. The Invite is, at its heart, a dense character study – the kind of thing that can so easily go off the rails and dissolve into self-involved navel-gazing without a strong directorial vision and an excellent cast. But, luckily, this movie has both, and delivers one of the most compelling and downright entertaining relationship dramedies in recent memory.
I mean, it helps if you love this cast as much as I do, but there’s no denying just how electric this foursome (ahem, well, not quite) are on-screen together – and they need to be for how much the movie asks of them. The script (by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones) is as much bawdy sex comedy as it is tragedy, laced with elements of slapstick, comedy-of-manners, and classic drama. It lays the groundwork for all the tiny niggles and disagreements that have begun to rise to boiling point for Joe and Angela in the first few minutes, and puts them over the edge with the apparently-blissful physical and romantic relationship between their upstairs neighbours.
Rogen is the only one of the main cast primarily known as a comedy actor, but I think Wilde made the right choice in casting for a more dramatic focus here – Norton and Cruz, in particular, pull on some more serious threads without letting things dip into the trite or maudlin, and the chemistry between the four leads (sexual and otherwise) is exceptional. There’s no pairing here that you don’t want to see more of, the overlapping parallels only serving to underline the distance between them, and it’s a testament to their talent and understanding of these characters that you never get bored of such a narrow focus.
And, while this is a delightful feature for every actor involved, the fifth character in this piece is Wilde’s directorial style; the inside of Angela and Joe’s apartment contains almost the entire movie, and the way it’s shot, the way Wilde uses the space and the cold, sickly colours and the divides between rooms to coax out the nuances of each of these dynamics is a downright joy to watch. It’s a tremendous statement about Wilde’s talent behind the camera, and her deftness in using space, shape, and blocking to deepen the feel of her stories; if she needed a movie to confirm her capital-F Film credentials, The Invite is exactly that.
The Invite is one of the richest and most interesting character studies of the year, a four-hander that weaves the bawdy with the bittersweet to excellent effect. Even if the couples’ night goes wrong, the movie that results from it a delight – and an undeniable return to form for Wilde.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Guardian)
No But Listen 