Seth Rogen adds zest and bite to the fruity dinner party comedy The Invite, directed by and starring Olivia Wilde alongside Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. The film is a four-way sex comedy of embarrassment, as if JB Priestley had written a play about swinging. It is intriguing, amusing, and finally, somehow bizarrely moving.
Plot and Characters
Middle-class married life is satirised through two couples having an excruciating dinner party. Joe (Seth Rogen), a failed musician who now teaches music at a minor liberal arts college, and his wife Angela (Olivia Wilde) extend the invitation of the title to their stylish neighbours, therapist Piña (Penélope Cruz) and ex-firefighter Hawk (Edward Norton). Rogen is first among equals in this cast, the ironic insider-outsider perpetually undercutting the situation's proliferating absurdities with knowing gags or yelps of incredulous outrage, deploying his unmistakable laugh.
Screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones set up each of Rogen's droll punchlines, and without Rogen to ventilate the film's atmosphere, the proceedings might have felt oppressively artificial and translated. The film is adapted from a Spanish film, The People Upstairs directed by Cesc Gay, itself originally a stageplay, and there has already been a Korean remake of the original movie.
Key Scenes and Themes
Joe, who used to be in a band called the Onslaught, suffers from depression and a psychosomatic bad back, with the couple's off-camera 12-year-old daughter being the sole bright spot in his life. Angela has prepared an elaborately casual soiree for their supercool neighbours, to grumpy Joe's baffled resentment. Angela's ostensible purpose is to apologise for the noise from their recent renovation, but Joe intends to invite Piña and Hawk to apologise for keeping him awake with their inconsiderately noisy and uninhibited sex.
The subject of sex takes the conversation in unexpected directions. Cruz and Norton show Piña and Hawk as intimidatingly, effortlessly bohemian and progressive; they have an unbearable habit of relapsing into Spanish, which is rude but makes them look impossibly cosmopolitan. Where Piña and Hawk are serenely unruffled and superbly confident, Angela and Joe are sweaty and uptight, mortified and irritated at how parochial they are made to feel.
Style and Reception
The film is a clamorous, querulous, overcaffeinated movie that takes its time to settle down, beginning with almost every line of dialogue jarringly punctuated by a musical score, an oppressive mannerism that thankfully doesn't last long. It is broad, stagey, and contrived, with mood shifts almost like dinner-theatre in their suddenness. Yet Rogen's comedy credentials make the pure outrageousness of the twists and turns palatable.
The Invite resembles Roman Polanski's four-hander Carnage (2011), adapted from Yasmina Reza's stageplay, or Francis Veber's play and film Le Dîner de Cons, remade as Dinner for Schmucks with Steve Carell. There is something about bourgeois people being embarrassed over dinner that has exportable appeal. The film is funny, and Rogen is on top of his game.
The Invite is out now in the US, on 3 July in the UK, and on 9 July in Australia.
