Movie Review: The Invite – TheWill Downtown

The Invite is a dramedy from the dinner-party- gone-awry genre about a marriage and whether a sex party might save it – or will it make it go boom? It’s extremely savvy, very funny and packs an emotional punch. It stars Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton – and if there is more pleasure to be had than watching great actors behaving badly, I would genuinely wish to know about it.

It opens with a quote from Oscar Wilde: ‘One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.’ Joe and Angela’s marriage is hanging by a thread. Joe (Rogen), who was once in a rock band, now teaches at a second-rate music school. He arrives home angry at life, angry at his tiny bike: ‘The wheels are so small you have to pedal four times to get one proper wheel rotation out of it.’

He is horrified to discover that she has invited their upstairs neighbours for dinner. She insists that she told him. He insists that she didn’t. They have been married 15 years, and fighting is their style. Has he bought the wine as instructed? He has not. Bicker, bicker, bicker. He dislikes these neighbours as they can hear their loud sex noises at night. He dislikes encountering the man in the lift. ‘The eye contact is off the scale.’

He is further horrified to discover that she has purchased a new expensive rug in order to impress their guests. All her passion – and sexual frustration – has gone into renovating their San Francisco apartment.

The film is an adaptation of a Spanish stage play by Cesc Gay. And the director, Olivia Wilde – who also plays Angela – refuses to open things up; we stay in the apartment throughout. We see that Angela has done a good job. She tiled the vintage bathroom herself. It’s beautiful.

The neighbours are Hawk (Norton), a firefighter, and Pina, a psychotherapist and sexologist. They are sexually adventurous and have no shame in admitting that the loud sex noises could be them, but it could equally be coming from one of the sex parties they regularly host. They are here to invite them to one. (Hence: The Invite.) Or why not have one now, here, today? Angela and Joe are shocked, appalled and… excited. Will they? Won’t they?

The comedy flows. You’ll laugh quite a bit, and then there is a tonal shift in the third act that takes us into more sober, reflective territory, as we’re asked to consider compassion and forgiveness. The film critic Roger Ebert once said a film is not about what it’s about; it’s how it goes about it. You could say the opposite of Angela and Joe’s constant fighting. It’s not how they go about it that matters but what it’s about, which will be revealed, quite tenderly.

The film is sharply written and has a frenetic energy, despite us never leaving that apartment. And the cast look as though they are enjoying themselves as they cut loose. That said, Angela’s neuroticism could have been annoying had Wilde not chosen to portray her as a bundle of repressed desires. She turns out surprisingly sympathetic. As does Rogen, who shows he’s quite capable of emotional depth when he puts his mind to it. Cruz, meanwhile, is wonderfully Cruz, bringing charisma and sexual magnetism in spades, and Norton, as the insufferably smug Hawk, introduces a farcical element.

A word of advice, however. If your marriage has gone off the boil, sex parties really aren’t the answer. (Or are they?)

Rating: 7.5/10

I was engaged all through this one!