\n\tWhen you go into a movie knowing that it\u2019s about two couples who get together for a dinner party, there are certain expectations about what\u2019s going to happen that are just about wired into our moviegoing DNA. You expect that the dialogue, for a while, is going to be light, funny, brittle, caustic. You expect that as the evening wears on, the masks of civility will come off, revealing something more painful and maybe brutal under the surface. You expect that there might be serious flirtation (between the people who aren\u2019t partners), and that the whole thing will wind up structured as a kind of truth game. And you expect that by the end, there will be wreckage\u2026but maybe, in that destruction, a kind of healing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe Invite<\/a>,\u201d directed by Olivia Wilde<\/a> (\u201cDon\u2019t Worry Darling\u201d) from a script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, starring Wilde and Seth Rogen<\/a> as a grousing, long-married San Francisco couple who have their upstairs neighbors over to dinner, is a movie that lives up to every one of those expectations. Yet it does so in a way that\u2019s so original, so brimming with surprise, so fresh and up-to-the-minute in its perceptions of how relationships work (or don\u2019t), that you watch it in a state of rapt immersion and delight.<\/p>\n \n\tPart of what\u2019s novel about the movie is its tone, which is bitterly funny yet sneakily serious. It\u2019s as if we\u2019re watching \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?\u201d remade by the Woody Allen of \u201cHusbands and Wives.\u201d The Allen connection is there, most prominently, in the characterization of Joe (Rogen), a former indie-rock musician who is now an associate professor at a music conservatory near Berkeley (he\u2019s haunted by the fact that it\u2019s not nearly as good), and Angela (Wilde), who graduated from art school but never followed it up, except for the loving eye with which she has furnished and renovated their apartment. She\u2019s a high-strung bundle of nerve endings, while Joe is a wisecracking curmudgeon in the tradition of Allen and Larry David, though he\u2019s so down on everything that his jokes emit a hint of toxic despair.<\/p>\n \n\tThe two have a 12-year-old daughter, who\u2019s away at a sleepover, and they live in a spacious, cozy apartment that Joe inherited from his parents, which makes him feel like a failure. So does the fact that after one album with a small hit, his indie-rock dreams fizzled. As soon as Joe arrives home, and Angela informs him that the neighbors are coming over that night, the two begin to bicker (about whether she told him this already, about Joe scarfing a pickle off her appetizer plate, about the rug she just bought, about the fold-up bicycle that hurts his back and that he can\u2019t seem to fold up, about the fact that he didn\u2019t buy a bottle of wine). It doesn\u2019t take us long to see that these two will fight about anything under the sun, no matter how small, because that\u2019s now their way of connecting.<\/p>\n \n\tYet for all the controlled rancor on display, what draws us into \u201cThe Invite\u201d is the remarkable flow of the dialogue, the characters often talking over each other in a lifelike way, with just enough witty one-upmanship to make even domestic anger, presented as authentically as it is here, a pleasure to behold. It\u2019s the sound of two people who don\u2019t like each anymore, but it\u2019s also the sound of a communication that\u2019s so spiked with downbeat emotion it plays like jazz. (The film opens with an image collage scored to a jazzy version of \u201cIsn\u2019t It Romantic?,\u201d and yes, the use of that song is ironic in the extreme.)<\/p>\n \n\tThen the other couple comes over. P\u00edna (Pen\u00e9lope Cruz<\/a>) and Hawk (Edward Norton<\/a>) are everything Joe and Angela are not: mellow, glamorous, harmonious. She\u2019s a psychotherapist and sexologist, he\u2019s a retired fire fighter (though he acts more like a West Coast guru), and we know that they enjoy a robust sex life, because it has already been the subject of a major disagreement: They make so much \u201canimal\u201d noise at night that Joe wants to complain to them about it, whereas Angela, a compulsive people-pleaser, is horrified at the prospect that bringing that up could interfere with another woman\u2019s orgasms. (At least that\u2019s her rationale; you also get the feeling that she\u2019s simply too timid to want to raise the issue.)<\/p>\n \n\tAs soon as these two show up, Joe starts baiting Hawk, because that\u2019s just his way, and we start to pick up on the subtlety with which these four are going to interlock. Joe has no filter, but Hawk says that\u2019s what he likes about him. (He sounds sarcastic, until we realize he means it.) P\u00edna, who is from Spain, keeps the conversation earnest (if not quite honest), while Angela is an ebullient nervous wreck whose instinct is to cover everything up.<\/p>\n \n\tI can\u2019t discuss what happens in \u201cThe Invite\u201d without giving a little bit away, so here goes. The issue of that overly noisy sex is something P\u00edna and Hawk bring up all by themselves, which defuses the tension over it for about a minute. But then they reveal why their sex is so noisy: They\u2019re what used to be called swingers, only these two now present themselves as \u201cenlightened\u201d New Age addicts of group sex. The dialogue that emerges out of this is almost shocking in its casually explicit hilarity, because McCormack and Jones, in a brilliant act of screenwriting, have imagined this couple\u2019s erotic encounters in a nearly cinematic fashion, as expressions of their character. The movie asks us to laugh at sexual folly and adventure without reducing it to a joke. And that\u2019s before P\u00edna and Hawk make the movie\u2019s real invite: Do Joe and Angela want to join them in a foursome?<\/p>\n \n\tThat sounds like the premise of a certain kind of Sundance movie \u2014\u00a0let\u2019s call it kinky-cute. But \u201cThe Invite\u201d is blessedly not that movie. Wilde, as a director, shoots it with an astonishing feeling of lived-in experience. The apartment where the entire film takes place looks real, with a history; it\u2019s lit just right. And Joe and Angela\u2019s reaction to their neighbors\u2019 invitation isn\u2019t reduced to one thing. Their response unfolds like a flower. It\u2019s about horniness and loneliness and possibility, about the reasons they might actually want to have an orgy, and about how the movie is going to take this situation and run with it, neither playing it safe nor making it too easy.<\/p>\n \n\tAll four of the actors are amazing. Rogen, while rooted in his vintage persona of crusty rationality, has never explored it this deeply. Wilde, who\u2019s a spectacular actor, imbues Angela with so many frazzled shades of desire and unhappiness and dreams she\u2019s still clinging to that her performance is like a blur that gradually comes into beautiful focus. Norton gets us giggling at Hawk\u2019s Zen cowboy certitude, until we hear his own backstory, in a monologue you listen to in a spellbound hush. And Cruz, whose P\u00edna is the catalyst of all this, projects an erotic life force that comes with its own gamesmanship. It\u2019s P\u00edna who says, in essence, that some relationships need to die so they can come to life again as something else. \u201cThe Invite\u201d is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you go into a movie knowing that it\u2019s about two couples who get together for a dinner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[135949,146,85,46,397,3558,27655,888,48764,134588],"class_list":{"0":"post-256575","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-edward-norton","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-olivia-wilde","14":"tag-penu00e9lope-cruz","15":"tag-seth-rogen","16":"tag-sundance-film-festival","17":"tag-the-invite"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}