The Invite is a tough and uncomfortable film, as it expresses so much about our latter-day insecurities and how much we’ve lost sight of happiness. In a very hard-nosed, early Neil LaBute-ish kind of way, the script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones rips the Band-Aid off a festering wound and exposes it for all its damaged ugliness. No longer can the secrets and frustrations stay hidden for the sake of appearances; over the course of a hastily thrown dinner party with another couple, unhappy spouses Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde, who also directs) are forced to look at themselves and reckon with the unspoken truths that have led them to this specific night.
Some are kept vague, like Joe’s pointed insistence that his former music career in a one-hit wonder band stays off the table (and the turntable). Also kept loose is the real source of Angela’s unhappiness, but a lot of it stems from Joe’s unhappiness. Caught in between is their unseen daughter, who seems to be the only reason they’re trying to make anything work. But both of them are caught in a death spiral of bickering and antagonism, and they have no idea what to do when faced with upstairs neighbors Hawk and Pina (Penélope Cruz), a genuinely loving and supportive couple who are Joe and Angela’s polar opposites, both personally and professionally.
The aforementioned vagueness keeps us on a hook the entire time while sparky, spunky dialogue pops off from the four corners of the map each character represents. (Trying to dissect who’s north, south, east, or west would be an exercise in futility. I don’t think I possess the philosophical language to articulate that.) On one side, you have the hard-bitten realism of the stresses of modern-day life, found deeply embedded in every fiber of Joe and Angela’s beings. From their constant defensive posture—especially between themselves, never mind how they are with Hawk and Pina—to Joe’s jaded and suspect attitude and Angela’s desperation for any break in her routine or off-ramp out of the rut she’s in, this couple spends almost the entirety of the movie sniping at each other for perceived faults and negligence.
I like what Seth Rogen does to rise above the kind of characters he’s played before. Joe is a musician who took his shot, made it for a second, and then plummeted back to earth, winding up as a music professor—a job that goes in one ear and out the other, as seen in the opening. Rogen essays his character with dreary regret, grieving for the fun life Joe used to have and the good times he used to have with Angela, annoyed that the world has shuffled him into this little corner to wither and grow useless. Even his piano, upon which he probably wrote a lot of his band’s music, stays locked and unused. It’s as if the somewhat well-intentioned character Rogen played in Knocked Up matured unwillingly and did everything he once rebelled against, and now he’s pissed. Especially when Hawk and Pina keep him and Angela up with extremely loud sex noises, sometimes at 3 in the morning.
It’s a gripe that he expresses to Angela, who argues that he shouldn’t say anything about it to them, reasoning that Joe’s anger will be what they think about the next time they’re mid-coitus, not the importance of Pina’s orgasms. Olivia Wilde is at her anxiety-riddled best in The Invite, playing a woman hiding more grievances than the ones she outwardly expresses; considering that she’s almost non-stop airing said grievances from the opening credits, it’s amazing that Rashida and McCormack have higher gears to shift to for the rest of the movie. This foolhardy plan to invite these neighbors into their home was hers, and she’s woefully underprepared—both mentally and as a host—for what she’s undertaking. Angela so wants to look like they’ve got everything together and that they’re normally functioning adults, but she can’t stop frenetically brimming over every time she speaks, a nervous tic that Wilde absolutely nails. It’s as if she’s permanently stuck in the fight-or-flight response, and she can’t decide which one to pick.
What plagues Joe and Angela is a lack of openness toward each other and each other’s wants. So when Hawk and Pina come to visit under the premise of checking out their recently renovated apartment, Joe and Angela are thrown by how easygoing and open they are with each other, not to mention how shocked they are by Hawk and Pina’s openness with them. Even more shocking is the reason for the loud sex noises, which Pina and Hawk don’t mind discussing, but it’s totally out of Joe and Angela’s sphere of normalcy and respective outlooks on life. And when Pina and Hawk tell them that there’s another reason they came to visit, that’s when even more of Joe and Angela’s relationship gets put under a microscope.
By contrast, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton play Pina and Hawk as chill, go-with-the-flow kinds of people. Childless, carefree, and understanding, they seem to be the kind of people that Joe and Angela might’ve been if they’d focused on their happiness and kept life going for each other. Half the fun is watching Cruz play a little bit of a sexpot, but it’s her character’s brain that becomes more important as the film continues, and it’s absolutely wonderful seeing Cruz perform Pina’s gradual flip from enticing to analytical while still maintaining Pina’s air of desirability. Likewise, Norton joins Cruz in having his character show how life has changed him, taking the better, more unselfish path toward happiness. (Although it could be argued that Hawk could be seen as a parallel universe version of The Narrator from Fight Club if he’d given in to his “Ikea nesting instinct” and never met Tyler Durden.) There’s a wiser temperament Norton gives to Hawk, combined with a confident sureness in every move he makes toward his and Pina’s goal.
Olivia Wilde balances hilarity, slapstick, anger, sexiness, and a tired despair to make this awkward, fumbling, last-ditch attempt at either salvaging Joe and Angela’s marriage or putting the final nail in its coffin. The question is not about where they’ll wind up; it’s about where they are right now and what they’re willing to do about it. Joe and Angela have what they need, but in what seems like the last gasps of their relationship, they’re too stingy to give themselves to each other. And when their possible future selves are mirrored in Hawk and Pina, they don’t know whether to fight or give up. The Invite doesn’t try to state anything profound; it just asks us to look at what’s there and what’s holding them back from being more. And it has such a devil of a time doing it.
One Comment
Even if Wilde overplays her character’s desperation a bit, the humor about Joe and Angela‘s marriage difficulties carries us into a comic version of the Taylor/ BurtonWho’s afraid of Virginia Wolfe, as a truthfully realistic picture of a contemporary marriage. Now that landmark has stopped, providing movies of this level or the kind of indie or European quality, this is one of the few films distributed outside of New York LA or perhaps Chicago, that have been available all summer. It’s more than welcome and many thanks to all that have made it available.