Director Olivia Wilde’s new comedy THE INVITE is supposed to be a stark examination of two marriages and how they act and react when the possibility of switching partners for sex arises at a casual dinner party. Unfortunately, despite some decent laughs along the way, most of the humor here has a snickering, junior high school boy feeling to it, like when they start to discover a dirty vocabulary and amuse themselves endlessly dropping such words into conversation. What should have been the rarest of cinematic accomplishments these days – an adult comedy – unfortunately turns into a blathering farce that not only lacks sophistication, but it totally misses the opportunity to say something truly profound. The best the script by screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, adapting the droll Spanish play by Cesc Gay and his film adaptation, can do is underline every double entendre like Beavis and Butthead did in their immature running commentary on MTV three decades ago. And for a director who gave us the sly and grounded teen comedy BOOKSMART in 2020, it’s unfortunate that Wilde lets the whole thing here play like a broad farce pitched to the cheap seats.
The casting doesn’t help matters either. Joe, the main character, is played by Seth Rogen, and he’s supposed to be a depressed, lonely music teacher, unhappy in his job and marriage. He’s basically lost the will to care and the energy to even participate in school or at home. In Gay’s play, he is a sad and passively bitter man, but here, he’s a loud, nervous chatterbox who never shuts up and lets sarcastic asides pass as conversation because…well, he’s Seth Rogen, and that’s the role he does best. It worked in ZACK & MIRI MAKE A PORNO and won him Emmys for Apple TV’s THE STUDIO, but here, it feels too noisy and oafishly childish.
Joe’s wife, Angela, is played by the director herself, and it’s not easy doing double duty. Few try it, even fewer succeed at it. Wilde misses both marks here. Her character is supposed to be a smart, helicopter mom, the kind who makes sure the sleepover her 12-year-old daughter attends the evening of the dinner party is in a house free of any dangerous men or guns. Yet, she’s also a nincompoop who doesn’t check with her guests if they have food allergies to meat or cheese (the only thing she’s serving for hors-d’oeuvres) or whether they need any kind of beverages other than wine. Angela is almost as grumpy, loud, and belligerent as her husband, and Wilde cannot make Angela’s neurosis all that funny. It needed someone like Julie Bowen; instead, her Angela comes off like just another “Karen.”
When Joe arrives home from work, he is tired, in a mood from riding his bike, which exacerbates his bad back, and itching for a fight with his wife. She all too readily joins in the fracas, and they scream at each other for 10 minutes while she’s getting things ready for the upstairs neighbors. Joe insists she never told him they were coming, which only deepens the rift. Of course, the guests, Pena and Hawk (Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton), hear them shouting through the door when they arrive and immediately call them on it. If I were invited and heard such animosity, I’d have turned tail and retreated home, but they stuck it out. Then, after boasting about their swinging lifestyle, interrupted by Joe’s continually snarky asides, they inexplicably ask this awful couple to join them for a tryst. Somehow, Pena and Hawk still find them attractive. Yeesh.
Cruz and Norton at least underplay their roles, but their characters are written inconsistently. Pena is supposed to be a free spirit, sexually open and playful, yet later in the film, she complains bitterly about Joe staring at her breasts and then starts passing out withering judgments that belie such a “live and let live” persona. Norton is drolly funny, but his character soon becomes wildly contradictory as well when he shifts from a confident lothario to an insecure nerd, revealing his truer colors.
In the third act, the volatility between the four almost brushes up against WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF vibes, but none of the revelations between them are nearly as profound as they were in Edward Albee’s landmark play about a dinner party gone awry. Paul Mazursky’s BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE in 1969 also treads similar ground but had oodles more maturity and profundity. In that sex comedy, the middling, middle-aged couple of Bob and Carol, played by Robert Culp and Natalie Wood, realize that they aren’t as one with their contemporary times as they were trying to be. After their efforts to broaden their 40-something mindset, experimenting with casual drugs, and attending New Age retreats, they just couldn’t find it in themselves to swap partners with their equally uptight friends Ted & Alice (Elliot Gould and Dyan Cannon).
Here, THE INVITE doesn’t even bother to really ask if casual sex with others when you’re married is a no-no, let alone whether there are any obvious complications from trysting with strangers in your child’s bedroom. But then, Joe and Angela never demonstrate that they’re mature adults throughout most of this film, so why should they have any sense of morality, let alone parental obligation? It makes the cheap laughs of an immature, smirking comedy such as this one feel all the more unsavory.
