Review: THE INVITE

Music teacher Joe grinds his way home and collapses on the floor of his apartment to find out that his frantically tidying partner Angela has invited the loud-sex couple from upstairs over for nibbles and drinks. The ensuing argument is interrupted by the appearance of the other couple who take the sounds of argument in their stride. Two couples, one almost estranged and the other open and engaged. There's a lot of working out to do. That's the film. 

No, I'm not being dismissive. The awkwardness of the beginning gets ironed smooth by candid talk and the spirit of sharing which replace it with a constant tension. This needs nuanced performance to work as its sheer verbosity will need a lot of care. Director and actor Olivia Wilde steps up and mostly succeeds in giving us an ensemble piece that charges along. The actor in the director knew, also, that the way to making a talkfest work is a lot of physical action; not big, just supportive.

Where this gets strained is in an uneven hand with techniques like overlapping dialogue. While this can suggest confusion and add tension it can also be frustrating to view and distracting. From His Girl Friday to The Thing From Another World, contrapuntal speech should compact information and suggest urgency. Here, it enhances awkwardness risks vagueness and alienating chaos. The other factor is the score. Apart from some needledrops, the music in this film consists of harsh stabbing bowed solo strings that spike up as a kind of dialogue helper. The effect is disruptive, informationally noisy. It is never welcome.

What keeps saving The Invite is performance. It's a quartet that responds to an expert handling by a quarter of it. Seth Rogan's bitter Joe is ready to flee the scene for life until he hears what Pina and Hawk are into, the hard nut of his resentment of his life takes a lot of battery until the promise of responsibility-free hedonism appears. Pina, a sultry and sullen Penelope Cruz, and Hawk a masking Ed Norton who seems forever on the point of breaking, think of their activity with more of a new age leaning. Finally, there is conductor Olivia Wilde herself, frenetic, alert, hankering to trust something beyond the slow plunge into formlessness that her life has become. 

In earlier outings like Booksmart and Don't Worry Darling, Wilde had a tendency to overplay the comedy, pushing it toward a kind of Ken Russell psychocamp. That is mostly done here through the score and her own performance as Angela but what happens is that it fits perfectly into The Invite. Soon after, she would present a more tempered and naturalistic expression of it in I Want Your Sex under Greg Araki's direction. In place, among the other three distinct personae, her Angela provides a square-completing corner.

From the off, this reminded me of the kind of late 'sixties sex comedy. Taking its cues from recent French and Italian cinema, Hollywood affected a controlled explosion of risque issues-based movies, cleansed with the likes of the previous decade's aging stars like Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. If one pops up on a streamer, give it a spin. Wilde's cinephilia makes this stagey fare a movie rather than a theatre piece as the various spaces in the house are used to strong effect.

The Invite works despite its moments of overplay like the score and counterpoint dialogue and it works because the cast make it work. The issues harboured by the couples might seem spare but their handling that reveals vulnerability and fear through fine acting craft brings the whole thing home. I have not seen the Spanish original but will now hunt it down. This is a comedy that works best if you do some work but it will be work well done.