If you are exhausted by the infantilization of American movies, there is hope. If you think a film about neighbors in an apartment building is going to be just another failed comedic farce, well, there’s even more hope.
Say hello to “The Invite,” a fresh, funny, fearless feature that offers a promising jaunt to the movies and delivers an even better jolt to the system. It is playing in theaters.
In “The Invite,” Angela and Joe (Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen) are in a rut. The married couple is raising a child, and over the course of their marriage, they have lost their spark. You know, that spark. Angela has a degree in art and hasn’t done much with it, although their apartment is beautifully decorated. Joe is a music instructor and an unrelenting curmudgeon. What especially makes him miserable is the sound of the loud and seemingly ceaseless lovemaking heard from his neighbor’s apartment. What is going on in there, he asks. What are they doing, Joe wonders.
Angela knows full-well that something different from yet another typical evening home for her and Joe is necessary. She makes plans. Their 12-year-old daughter is going to be away on a sleepover one night. Angela invites the apparently sexually satisfied Hawk and Pina (Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz) over for dinner. Joe forgets about it, which means he doesn’t pick up the wine he was supposed to. He claims not to remember Angela mentioning the dinner. Well, you know what Sigmund Freud would say. And Joe is made especially miserable by the fact that the couple coming over is a font of pleasurable noise, albeit fiercely annoying to him.
That’s the set-up for what proves to be a grand comedy of manners as Angela becomes intrigued by what Hawk and Pina disclose. The neighbors become astonishing curiosities, and they seem to be having a lot of good old adult fun. Joe slowly finds them fascinating. As his anger erodes, he also discovers that he and Angela have been missing out on an interesting new opportunity, which just happens to be within earshot. Hawk and Pina are swingers. It’s not just two people enjoying adulthood; it’s others joining in.
“The Invite” is a daring adventure in adult behavior. It unfolds in a single setting, has only four essential characters, and feels as if you’re traveling through the most deliciously wicked, genuinely comic aspects of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.” That’s not a bad thing. “The Invite” began as a Spanish play and in 2020, it was turned into “The People Upstairs,” a film from Spain.
Angela and Joe are living lives that reside in a nest of bickering and nitpicking. Do Hawk and Pina offer an escape? Or is just knowing about what they are into enough to change the direction of their own dull marriage? The dinner party may not be a prelude to action, but it is certainly a prelude to knowledge. Adults like Angela and Joe need to take baby steps.
What’s especially important is that the acting is terrific. Rogen is the best I’ve seen him. Cruz is sublime and Norton is sensationally good. Wilde, who also directed the movie, is perfect as Angela. Her direction is crisp and utterly uncompromising. She’s realistic. Of course, the dinner party has its ups and downs. Her sense of the tempo and mood of what we are watching is pitch-perfect. She builds everything carefully with a solid understanding of how people behave. The movie positively crackles with energy delivered by the flawlessly written dialogue from screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones. Find the opportunity to accept “The Invite.” It’s one of the best comedies I’ve seen in years.