The latest self-hating Millennial non-rom-com
It’s too bad that Joachim Trier already used the title The Worst Person in the World for his 2021 film; its pluralization would perfectly describe the new A24 release titled The Invite that, indeed, features some of the least trustworthy people in the cinema world.
Actress Olivia Wilde fancies herself a film director and stars in her latest project as Angela, a bourgeois San Francisco housewife. Her husband Joe (the obnoxious Seth Rogen) hates his nepo-baby existence, defined by sharing a pre-war double-wide apartment beneath upstairs neighbors Hawk (the obnoxious Edward Norton) and Piña (the standard-less Penélope Cruz), whom they host for dinner during one long evening.
In a meta sense, this cast plays itself: Vixenish Wilde’s Angela struggles to subdue the innate harpy Clint Eastwood brought out so well in Richard Jewell. Immature Rogen’s Joe recalls his usual resentful doofus. Guileful Norton’s Hawk resembles his previous innumerable smart-asses. Impish Cruz’s Piña is a blonde-wigged version of her Spanish spitfire routine. These too-familiar types interact as expected, leaving no surprises in the acerbic script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones based on the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, by Cesc Gay.
This Americanized version of European sophistication claims a native cynicism that, like the Zendaya–Robert Pattinson film The Drama, congratulates national self-hatred. (These are the people behind the destruction of liberal cities.) Angela, Joe, Hawk, and Piña compete in terms of taste, wealth, and the knowingness that they confuse with intelligence. But Wilde, McCormack, and Jones avoid genuine criticism of Bay Area vanity; nothing in this class-based game of egotism enlightens what we already know about affluent peculiarities from news out of the Pelosi, Swalwell, and Newsom households. Instead, Wilde aims for low-hanging fruit, using upper-class envy to tease common folks’ shame — the attitude Michael Shellenberger coined as “San Fran-Sicko.”
Several laudatory reviews of The Invite compare its “dramedy” to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, an insult to Edward Albee’s extraordinary play about marital tension. It’s an ignorant comparison that overlooks Albee’s psychological profundity in favor of contemporary sexual madness. Cesc Gay’s conceit doesn’t transfer to American domestic turmoil — the realistic sensibility that sparked The Ref, Ted Demme’s 1994 comedy of domestic/social fracture ironically set at Christmastime. Wilde’s amateur visual style (lots of mirrors and angled reflections) lacks Demme’s comedic verve that was also evident in his films Who’s the Man? and his great Eddie Murphy–Martin Lawrence prison comedy, Life.
In this non-rom-com, Wilde’s direction smacks of cynicism as she also demonstrated in the repellent Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling, products of a barely suppressed feminist hostility. Wilde dedicates The Invite to the late Diane Keaton, probably for her moving characterization of a divorcée in the Bay Area drama Shoot the Moon — another example of cinematic miseducation like Kristoffer Borgli’s film references in The Drama. Wilde’s truest tribute is her often sharply unpleasant performance as Angela (she and Cruz beat Rogen and Norton’s sleazeball smugness).
Yet The Invite doesn’t risk the personal revelation that made Shoot the Moon great; the couples’ humor evades emotional authenticity, most especially when the upstairs pair invites the downstairs pair to participate in an orgy. Wilde succumbs to fashionable sexual disorientation, offering profane bravado, not sensitivity. Sex perverts Wilde’s conception of what Jean-Marie Straub has called “class relations.” This is still another Millennial film that makes you despair the loss of Paul Mazursky, whose orgy-daring Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and marital-fidelity film Blume in Love are sadly forgotten. (Kubrick paid homage to Blume in Love in Eyes Wide Shut but couldn’t match it.)
Wilde’s comedy of interpersonal destruction rebukes marital tradition — a disinvitation of monogamy by Hollywood professionals who embrace the current sexual instability as progress. If you ever wondered whether politicized actors like Wilde, Rogen, and Norton combined activism in their professional work, here it is in The Invite’s battle of affluent dirtbags.
