Critic-at-Large - Issue 15

Who’s Afraid of Ethical Non-Monogamy?

The Invite is one of this year’s best (and funniest) films

Mild spoilers ahead. 

Nobody in this damned country remembers Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of the last century’s nastiest and most nastily brilliant playscripts. An eviscerating document of a marriage falling apart at one epic dinner party in which nobody is allowed to leave (much less consume food), it's the closest literary antecedent to the latest Olivia Wilde film The Invite. What I didn’t quite expect from The Invite, then, was its gift for light comedy, which may have to do with the film it's based on, the Spanish-language Sentimental from 2020. Set over the course of one evening, it follows Joe and Angela, a bickering couple, as they prepare to host their loud upstairs neighbours, Hawk and Pina, in their apartment. Joe’s been blindsided by the invite, which was Angela’s last-minute doing, and plans to confront the neighbours about the loud (and very good!) sex they’ve been having, which they seem to be rubbing in Joe and Angela’s faces. But as the evening goes on, the two receive an invite of their own in return: to group sex with Hawk and Pina. As far as plotting goes, that’s about it. And so the heavy lifting here comes from the screenplay, which is very tidy, by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, filling out the runtime quite effortlessly with chatty conversation, lovingly blocked and rehearsed by its actor-director, Wilde. The direct antecedents are Who’s Afraid and Sentimental — yet I also get echoes of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, the best work of Woody Allen, and footage of car crashes. If it feels stagey (and it sure does), that’s largely the point: here’s a couple with deep problems trying to put on a show. 

With a script and a scenario like this one, the acting has got to be good—and it is. There’s a special kind of double thrill here (because the cast is made up of celebrity actors) of seeing these big-name stars turn out a delicious performance, a reminder of the skills that made them their names in the first place. It's impossible not to love Penelope Cruz’s Pina, who she takes naive and bushy-tailed at first, with her accent and her youth and her beauty, almost a little trophy-wifeish... and then she steals the conversation. Similarly, Edward Norton keeps Hawk real enough that he’s not just a foil to the other characters, and he’s got a tough monologue in the second act that he does just well enough that you might not realise the script is struggling. But who for many has been the highlight—Seth Rogen’s Joe—I found occasionally a little overwrought. He’s certainly not playing for the back row here, but how many lines can you deliver in the bland uptalk of marital resentment, the raising of the voice and covering of the vowel...? A lot, it seems! He also really goes for the physical comedy with a twerk in one of the seduction scenes, which seems to miss the point (and the laugh: it was greeted with silence in my screening). Of course, it’s Wilde’s knock-out performance as blown-out Angela (you almost think she’s on uppers until you see her take a xanax), anxious for things to be normal, which is so absorbing it’s worth the price of the ticket alone. (She also has the film’s best gag, when she receives her first lesbian kiss with prayer hands, a “namaste” of thanks, and those insanely alert eyes.)

Wilde first came to attention as an actress on the long-running medical drama House, but my generation (apart from you House freaks) will know her for her 2019 directorial debut Booksmart. I remember adoring Booksmart for its skinniness and its gently fantastical pulse, though a quick glance through the old Letterboxd snipes from the time see a number of people emphasising the film’s lack of “class consciousness” as though class consciousness could be measured with a yard stick. What was wrong with us in the late 10s? This need for a film to be everything and do everything, all under the smarmy well-meaning liberal pronouncement of “intersectionality”... it’s so dangerous and so aesthetically poisonous. Everything is political, yes, but that’s a fact about the political, not the everything—and it’s certainly not to say that artwork ought to hold up slogans, stances, or “takes” on questions that may fly outside its orbit. What I’m trying to say is that it seems clear to me Wilde is a director who has chosen her subjects and has proven that she can work very fluently with them. The Invite will not awaken you to revolution—in fact, aside from some talk of inheritance and a few comparative comments about apartment size between the couples, it barely speaks on the subjects of money or class. And why should it? Wilde’s subject here precisely is the comfortable, and she tracks keenly the hidden tensions and resentments that comfort can sweep under the rug only temporarily. The Invite takes place in a locked room after all: it necessarily occludes the rest of the world. And yet one of the beautiful paradoxes about domestic life is that it seems to instantiate the world out there, replacing social ideas with actual people. The Invite is in some ways a collection of miniatures of a whole range of issues: marriage, heterosexuality after patriarchy, sexual monogamy, anxiety, and so on. Wilde’s direction has it all close-cropped, and its edit brings the collisions of its script together in a flurry of technique that is so achieved it’s virtually unnoticeable. I dare you, film majors, to try and cut a scene as well as these filmmakers before you two-star this middle-class sex comedy for not being woke enough on Letterboxd.