The Invite (2 stars out of 4)
Your capacity to get through Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” should be measured by your interest in spending almost two hours watching miserable people argue and/or conduct lengthy graphic discussions of their dysfunctional sex lives.
The premise is pretty simple: an unhappy married couple in San Francisco invites their bohemian upstairs neighbors over for a dinner party, and hijinks ensue. It’s a little like the famous Dinner Party episode of TV’s “The Office,” only four times as long, with a lot more profanity and sex talk, and no Jim and Pam to ground the chaos in reality.
Joe (Seth Rogen) is a music teacher at a Bay Area middle school, and his wife Angela (Olivia Wilde) is passionate about interior decorating. They have a teenage daughter we never meet, and after we watch Joe and Angela interact for a little bit, we don’t blame her for not being around. The opening of the film is an extended argument between the unhappy couple; on the surface, it’s about the impending dinner party, but the subtext makes it clear these two could come to blows over the three different shades of blue that Angela is currently testing out in the master bedroom.
If you can make it through this opening salvo, things calm down a bit once the neighbors arrive. Hawk (Edward Norton) is a retired firefighter who comes across more like a guidance counselor, and Pina (Penelope Cruz) is an actual counselor who periodically displays the intensity of a firefighter. These two couples are a mismatch, and they almost seem to revel in making each other uncomfortable, but there is an additional source of tension. Hawk and Pina’s nocturnal activities have become increasingly noisy in recent weeks, and Joe is almost desperate to address the issue, to Angela’s obvious horror.
The “odd couple” dynamic sets into a rhythm, and for a time, “The Invite” almost becomes enjoyable. Then comes the explanation for the upstairs activities–Hawk and Pina are swingers who have become fond of throwing sex parties on the weekends–and after a lengthy description of their deviant lifestyles to a now enraptured Joe and Angela, “The Invite” reveals the specific meaning behind its title.
Then: more hijinks, more fighting, more arguing, rinse and repeat.
“The Invite” is a remake of a Spanish film called “The People Upstairs,” and beneath the profanity and graphic sex talk, Wilde’s film is meant to be a comedy–punctuated with the hard-hitting reality of the complexities of marriage. To its credit, the script does offer some scattered laughs, as well as some well-chosen needle drops. Best of all, once the dust settles, “The Invite’s” ending offers a quiet and thoughtful contrast to everything that came before.
The problem is getting through everything that came before. Sometimes you have to go through the lows to get to the highs, and “The Invite” is clearly trying to show you Joe and Angela’s worst in order to appreciate their best. When you get past all the unseemly exterior, “The Invite’s” main characters wrestle with common challenges, but Joe and Angela–who are altogether way too quick and too happy to accept Hawk and Pina’s indecent proposal–will only remain relatable to a narrow sliver of the audience.
The question is whether the payoff is worth the journey, and if you’re asking me, the answer is no. I hated the beginning of the movie, and the middle exhausted me. The ending was good, but it wasn’t good enough.
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“The Invite” is rated R for persistent profanity and graphic sexual dialogue, along with some brief violence (done for laughs).