Tainted Love: Film Review of The Invite
★★★1/2
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
It’s not often when a film combines sexual sophistication, bedroom farce, and the bloody marrow of marital strife into a watchable film, let alone one of the most watchable films in recent memory. The Invite is one of those few instances where these disparate elements combine to form a surprise souffle, sort of a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets Annie Hall meets Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.
The Invite is a remake of a Spanish film The People Upstairs, and based on Cesc Gay’s play. The Invitescreenplay was written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and directed by Olivia Wilde, who also stars in it. The movie’s origin on the stage is evident in the somewhat claustrophobic setting—almost entirely Joe and Angela’s apartment—and in the wonderfully genuine—and wince worthy—dialogue.
The film opens with a pastiche of shots of a young couple playfully playing a duet on piano. The footage is faded and grainy, probably signifying memory. The camera cuts away to Joe (Seth Rogen) sitting and staring in an auditorium surrounded by empty seats. The musical ensemble he is supposed to be teaching stares at him, waiting for feedback, but he only stands up and walks away.
We cut to Angela (Olivia Wilde) shopping and feverishly getting their apartment ready for entertaining. The camera cuts away to Joe taking his bike onto BART and then agonizingly pedaling up the hills to their apartment.
The two go at it almost the moment Joe gets home. He complains about the bike hurting his back. Angela says it’s good for him. He blames Angela for gifting him the bike which causes him his chronic back pain. The two lapse into what seems to be a familiar argumentative rut, blaming each other for all their problems. Joe explodes when he discovers Angela has invited the upstairs neighbors Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penelope Cruz) down for a dinner party.
He starts complaining about all the noise coming from their apartment late at night, noise that is unmistakably made during sex. Angela shoots back that Joe never wants to go out or meet new people, that he is only happy being miserable. Joe gripes about Angela constantly going out and buying things and threatens to confront the neighbors about the noisy sex. And so it goes and goes and goes until the doorbell rings.
Pina and Hawk arrive, and Hawk—disarmingly honest—asks if it’s a bad time because he heard them arguing out in the hallway. Angela nervously denies it, then hedges, and then confesses it. Joe doesn’t give a damn and says so. He is openly hostile and sarcastic towards his guests, who graciously ignore his rudeness.
The evening goes from bad to worse. Pina cannot eat meat or cheese—any of the charcuterie board which Angela has labored over. She burns the souffle she has been preparing and Joe has forgotten the wine.
The foursome makes some small talk. Joe and Angela discover Hawk is a retired firefighter and Pina is a therapist and sexologist. Angela tells them that Joe is a music teacher who used to be in a somewhat successful band. Joe does not want to talk about it. When Hawk spies Joe’s piano and attempts to open it, Joe slams it shut. No one is allowed to play his piano.
Things finally start to thaw when Joe proclaims he’s going to smoke a joint and Pina asks to join him while Angela takes Hawk for a tour of the apartment. Away from their respective spouses, Joe and Angela are engaging and funny people. It seems as if it’s only in the pressure cooker of their marriage that they are mean, vindictive, and angry people.
Hawk asks Angela if they have tequila, which she does. When they get together and have a few shots, Joe is about to complain to them about their overly loud sex, but Hawk beats him to the punch, apologizing for the noise. He then goes on to tell them that the reason they are so loud is because of the group sex they are having upstairs.
Joe and Angela are intrigued and excited. The night takes a couple of awkward spirals and left turns before the two couples find emotional equilibrium between themselves and the others.
While it would have been very for this screenplay to descend into broad farce, Jones and McCormack have managed to achieve an emotional depth and an everyday reality—the reality of the emotional rut of familiarity—into this narrative that transcends its situation.
While the comic elements of the farce really shine when Joe and Angela decide to take the plunge—like something straight out of Hotel Paradiso—the focus afterwards turns to the bitterness, pain, and resulting anger fermenting in their deteriorating marriage.
With dialogue every bit as scathing as George and Martha’s exchanges in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the viewer is drawn into the very relatable frustrations and disappointments of two people blaming each other for the failures in their own lives. It is both harrowing and pitiful to watch these two go at it because it is really themselves and each other they are angry at. It’s difficult not to feel sorry for them.
Angela sees a window (a literal, not a metaphorical one) for release while Joe will not allow himself to reconcile his past or even acknowledge his present. The couple’s only saving grace is their daughter Maggie, who, like the son in Virginia Woolf, we never see.
The acting in the film is nothing short of superb. No one does biting sarcasm like Rogen and he excels at that here. Even when he softens up while getting high, his remarks are at the best smarmy, and at the worst, snide. At the same time, he allows the hurt underneath to peek out occasionally.
Wilde does a superb job portraying the brittle nervousness of Angela, combining a desperate desire to connect with anything human. At times, her face is clenched as tight as a fist. To my eye, her performance was reminiscent of Annette Benning’s turn as a desperate housewife in American Beauty tinged with the adorable affections very much like Diane Keaton (to whom the film is dedicated) in Annie Hall, yet these influences never overwhelm her performance.
Norton’s Hawk is cool, level-headed, and as accepting as a hippie from the 1967 Haight. Cusack is able to tinge Hawk’s persona with a sense of the man trying a little too hard and ends up looking a little dumb, but during a monologue later in the movie, he manages to access a depth to Hawk that had been missing.
Cruz’s Pina seems to be the most mature of the bunch. Not only is she a professional therapist, but she possesses insights into the Joe and Angela’s marriage that not only ring true but are very difficult for even the viewer to hear. She possesses a gravity missing in Angela and Joe, and even Hawk, that anchors the third act.
Filming a stage play can present a special set of difficulties for the director. Some may decide to go completely off-set, while others decide to keep the narrative behind the proscenium of the lens. 12 Angry Men does the latter (although the action gives it little choice), and director Sidney Lumet chose to use over one hundred camera angles while shooting the film, adding a visual dimension to the film which worked on both conscious and subconscious levels.
Wilde also uses a variety of camera to underline narrative points and character nuances. Some shots are framed through windows, while others include various angles of the apartment’s architecture, while others follow the action through walls. The opening sequence between Joe and Angela contain a wonderful sequence over their bed (one source of their contention) onto which they are placing dirty laundry. It is a wonderfully emblematic shot.
The Invite is a very good film. Combining elements of farce, the raw wounds of a failing relationship, and the redemptive powers of confession, this is a film that is not only eminently relatable (to most married couples) and as tantalizing and alluring as an erotic novel, but the true strength of this film is in its message of forgiveness, understanding, redemption, and love.
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