Here is a four-way sex comedy of embarrassment, as if JB Priestley had written a play about swinging. But as well as embarrassing, it is intriguing, amusing and, finally, somehow bizarrely moving.<\/p>\n
Middle class married life is satirised in the personae of two couples having an excruciating dinner party. A failed musician and his wife, played by Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde (who also directs), extend the invitation of the title to their stylish neighbours, a therapist and ex-firefighter played by Pen\u00e9lope Cruz and Edward Norton<\/a>. Rogen is first among equals in this cast, the ironic insider-outsider perpetually undercutting the situation\u2019s proliferating absurdities with knowing gags or yelps of incredulous outrage, and deploying that unmistakable yuk-yuk-yuk laugh.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones obviously relish setting up each of Rogen\u2019s droll punchlines, and without Rogen to ventilate the film\u2019s atmosphere, the proceedings might have felt oppressively artificial and translated. It is in fact adapted from a Spanish film, The People Upstairs directed by Cesc Gay<\/a>, itself originally a stageplay (and there has already been a Korean remake of the original movie).<\/p>\n Rogen is Joe, a guy who used to be in a band called the Onslaught, and has now settled for teaching music in a minor liberal arts college and living in his late parents\u2019 apartment. He suffers from depression and a psychosomatic bad back, though the couple\u2019s (off-camera) 12-year-old daughter is pretty much the sole bright spot in his life. Angela (Wilde) has prepared an elaborately casual soiree for their supercool neighbours Pi\u00f1a (Cruz) and Hawk (Norton), to grumpy Joe\u2019s baffled resentment. Angela\u2019s ostensible purpose is to apologise for the noise she and Joe made with their recent renovation \u2013 but Joe, in his passagg way, now intends to invite Pi\u00f1a and Hawk to make their own apology for keeping him awake with their inconsiderately noisy and uninhibited sex.<\/p>\n It is the subject of sex which is to take the conversation in unexpected directions. Cruz and Norton enjoyably show how Pi\u00f1a and Hawk are intimidatingly, effortlessly bohemian and progressive; they have an unbearable habit of relapsing into Spanish in front of their hosts, a habit which is of course rude, but always makes them look impossibly cosmopolitan and suave. Where Pi\u00f1a and Hawk are serenely unruffled and superbly confident, poor Angela and Joe are sweaty and uptight, and mortified and irritated at how parochial they are made to feel. The scene is surely set for an awful culture clash. Yet that isn\u2019t exactly what happens.<\/p>\n In some ways this is a clamorous, querulous, overcaffeinated movie; it takes its time to settle down, and in fact begins by having almost every line of dialogue jarringly punctuated with a musical score \u2013 an oppressive mannerism which thankfully doesn\u2019t last very long. It is certainly broad, stagey and contrived, and the mood shifts are almost like dinner-theatre in their suddenness \u2013 yet Rogen\u2019s comedy credentials mean that the pure outrageousness of the twists and turns are palatable.<\/p>\n The Invite resembles Roman Polanski\u2019s four-hander Carnage from 2011<\/a>, adapted from Yasmina Reza\u2019s stageplay \u2013 or indeed Francis Veber\u2019s play and film Le D\u00eener de Cons<\/a>, remade as Dinner for Schmucks with Steve Carell<\/a>. Maybe there\u2019s something about bourgeois people being embarrassed over dinner that has a certain exportable appeal. The Invite is funny \u2026 and Rogen is on top of his game.<\/p>\n The Invite is out now in the US, on 3 July in the UK and on 9 July in Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here is a four-way sex comedy of embarrassment, as if JB Priestley had written a play about swinging.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-665913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}