Film Review: The Invite

Do not miss The Invite. Let me start there.

The opening is genius. From holding a very long view of Seth Rogen sitting in an empty orchestra section listening to music he clearly isn’t listening to, right up to his wobbly way of riding his stupid-ass bike up the hills of San Francisco, this is an opening they should teach in film school.

And that’s before anyone really says anything.

The Invite could easily slip by while louder, bigger movies suck up all the oxygen. Don’t let it. This belongs on the list for consideration for every award out there.

The Invite is a marital autopsy. Except everybody is still alive.

And that makes all the difference. Because when you conduct a marital autopsy while the people in the marriage are sitting right there, breathing, drinking wine, having dinner and defending the choices they’ve made, you can create so much tension that an audience simply can’t sit with it.

Enter humor.

Without the humor, I don’t think this film works. But here was the challenge. For about the first third of the film, it’s the same kind of humor over and over again, and I started wondering. Are they going to get beyond this? Is Seth Rogen going to keep being Seth Rogen? Is this going to become one long uncomfortable joke about sex and marriage and the people upstairs who apparently have figured out both?

Oh, they get beyond it.

They do. They do. They do.

As everyone’s backstory begins to come forward, something really interesting happens. Any fog around these people becomes empathy. Not necessarily agreement. Empathy. And suddenly the jokes that seemed to be carrying the film aren’t carrying it anymore. The people are.

That’s when The Invite becomes something much better than the comedy it could have settled for.

There are four people in a New York apartment. Angela and Joe, played by Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen, are married and not exactly having the time of their lives. Their upstairs neighbors, Pina and Hawk, played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, arrive for dinner with a considerably different approach to marriage, sex and apparently just about everything else.

And then they talk.

That’s pretty much the movie.

Which makes what happens next rather remarkable.

The story began as Els veïns de dalt (The People Upstairs), a stage play by Catalan writer and director Cesc Gay. Gay later turned his play into the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs. The material traveled through other adaptations before arriving here, with Rashida Jones and Will McCormack adapting it for the American screen and Olivia Wilde directing.

Once I knew that history, the architecture of the film made perfect sense. You can feel the play underneath it. Four actors. Essentially one apartment. Conversation. No car chase coming to save anyone. No spectacular landscape to cut to when the energy drops. Nowhere to go but the library, the living room and the kitchen.

That’s a 2 x 4 stage with a camera in it.

And directing that is not easy.

Wilde does it brilliantly. She finds movement where there really isn’t anywhere to move. She understands when to stay with a face and, more importantly, when not to rescue us from an uncomfortable moment. The apartment gradually stops feeling like a limitation and starts feeling like the fifth character. We’re all trapped in there together, and nobody gets to leave until some things have been said.

And then there are the actors.

If you’re auditioning for Juilliard, take any one of the monologues performed by these four actors and use it as your entrance video. If you have any talent at all, this will showcase it.

They’re smooth. They’re insightful. They’re unforgiving and forgiving at exactly the same time.

Olivia Wilde has to allow us into a woman whose anger and disappointment could easily have made her unbearable. It doesn’t. It makes her human.

And Seth Rogen. "Seth, since I’m not a fan of your podcast, can I just say this? Stick to film.

God, you’re good."

He knows exactly how to use the thing we think we already know about him and then move beyond it. The humor is there, of course, but so is something much harder to pull off. Hurt. Vulnerability. Resentment. Love. Sometimes all within the same exchange.

And when Ed Norton tells us his backstory? Those three minutes are everything. And he deserves to be awarded for them.

Which leads me to Ed Norton, where have you been? And why are you not in every movie I see now?

Please stop disappearing.

You belong in every film that’s ever made.

And Penélope Cruz.

If you want to understand what it means when people say the camera loves someone, watch Penélope Cruz in this movie. Our Spanish queen may truly be one of the most stunning human beings alive. Every time I see her on a screen, I think it again.

But don’t let that distract from what she’s doing. Pina could so easily have been reduced to the beautiful, sexually liberated European woman who arrives to teach the uptight Americans how to live. Cruz refuses to let that happen. There is history underneath everything she says. Eventually there is pain there, too.

That’s really the magic trick all four of them pull off.

This movie could have gone off the rails in about fifteen different directions. It could have become a sitcom. It could have become a lecture about monogamy. It could have become a smug celebration of sexual liberation. It could have made one marriage right and the other wrong.

Instead, it performs an autopsy on both.

And discovers they’re still alive.

The Invite isn’t really about swinging. It isn’t even really about sex. It’s about what happens when we look at another marriage and wonder if maybe they figured out something we didn’t. And then what happens when we get close enough to discover that they haven’t.

They’ve just figured out different things.

Don’t miss this film. It will be easy to miss because it isn’t getting the kind of reach some of the bigger films are getting.

Seek it out.

And when awards season comes around, I hope the people who decide these things remember that sometimes four extraordinary actors, a living room, a kitchen, a library and a marital autopsy can be every bit as cinematic as anything happening on a screen ten times its size.

And the ending? It’s abrupt.