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Imagine a couple, no longer young, frustrated with what they have achieved and at odds with each other. Ripe for comedy, no?
Try as they might to re-set one evening as they prepare to host the neighbours from upstairs for dinner, it doesn't work. Where is the wine? Why has a new, most likely expensive rug suddenly appeared on the lounge room floor? Why go to such trouble to impress with the food prep and the vase of flowers? The bickering starts anew.
Music college professor Joe (Seth Rogen) is against the idea of having visitors over, but his wife Angela (Olivia Wilde) is determined her dinner invite will go ahead. Besides, they are curious. Night after night, the neighbours keep them and their young daughter awake with noisy lovemaking. Who does the groaning, and who does the whimpering. They want to know.
The moment Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (c) arrive the fun escalates a notch or two. Would Joe and Angela prefer they arranged for dinner another time? Oh yes, Joe would like that, but Angela is steadfast, although embarrassed that their guests know they were fighting. Off to a rocky start.
The food doesn't work out well either. The souffle is burnt and must be swiftly pitched into the bin. Then, as she offers jambon for starters, it transpires that Pina is vegetarian. And that it isn't jambon on the platter, it's something else. The luscious flan that Pina bought becomes the main course, but didn't she say that she avoids sugar too? Her flan is surely full of sugar. It is probably advisable to take what Pina says with a grain of salt.
Squeezed into an eye-popping blouse and wearing a tousled blonde wig, Cruz has a lot of fun with her character, a psychotherapist and sexologist. She knows exactly how to pull all the strings, and to draw the camera's gaze, inevitably. It is good to see her in an American film again, after it once seemed that Hollywood didn't know quite how to use her. Here she shows off her Spanish origin in asides with Norton (fluent in Spanish), but we do not see any subtitled translation.
As Pina's live-in boyfriend, Hawk, a retired firefighter, Edward Norton does not have as much to do as the rest of the ensemble in this four-hander. His conversation is even more elliptical than Pina's, when he also offers Angela and Joe his suggestions for adopting a more expansive approach to life and intimate relations.
With Angela and Joe's 12-year-old away at a sleepover, the dinner party can take its course. After some wine and a joint, the hosts finally relax and conversation begins to flow. There is a tete-a-tete between Hawk and Angela as she shows him round the apartment, and between Pina and Joe as they share a joint and compare tattoos in the study. After a prickly first encounter turns relaxed and easy, the dinner hosts discover that they are the ones getting an invite now, rather than their visitors, and the plan for food and conversation unravels from there.
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Will The Invite take off? Let's hope so. The foreign film industries have been producing marvellous adult relationship comedy and drama for some time now while Hollywood has been dominated by visual effects-driven comic book action with superhuman characters. The American movie industry has some catching up to do in this space.
Wilde puts in a marvellously skilful comic turn, as does Rogen as her other half. It's interesting to think of him when he was young as a slacker, slow to grow up, in side-splitting comedies like Knocked Up and Superbad. He's reached his mid-40s now.
The Invite is funny, sharp and wise. Neither as devastating as the classic Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, nor the recent Marriage Story, nor a flippant swinging '60s piece like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice of long ago. And it is gentle with its characters.
This is another spirited and savvy film from director Olivia Wilde. Her first feature, the coming-of-age Booksmart, also a comedy, was also distinctive. The Invite is a very engaging relationship comedy with its own individual style, enhanced by an intelligent screenplay from Will McCormack and Rashida Jones and four mature, empathetic performances from its top-notch cast.
