Olivia Wilde’s last film, Don’t Worry, Darling, was a Lynchian wedding cake extravaganza about (in no particular order) sex and an awful marriage. Her latest, The Invite, is about the same topics, though in a much more conventional style and much less eye-catching visuals. Her strengths are still evident though; she has a great eye for casting (Harry Styles was perfect for that role) and gets excellent performances from her all-star actors. I’m not sure the world needed a version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with pegging jokes. But The Invite manages to pull off the conceit with professionalism, wit, and some heart.
Like the title says, the movie’s about a dinner gathering; cranky and depressed music teacher Joe (Seth Rogen) comes home to find that his powerfully neurotic wife Angela (Olivia Wilde) has asked their upstairs neighbors Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for the evening. Angela wants everything to go right; Joe mostly wants to confront the visiting couple about their very loud nightly sex which keeps him up. Unexpectedly, Hawk shares Angela’s love of rugs and interior decorating, and Pina’s a sex therapist, who’s a lot more willing to talk about the noise problem, and in a lot more detail, than Angela and Joe were expecting.
The movie gets a lot of mileage out of Joe’s normal-cranky-guy reactions to Angela’s high-strung perfectionism and to Hawk and Pina’s hippie-dippy sexual openness—epitomized by Hawk’s decision to call himself “Hawk.” Wilde , though, is careful to make sure that Angela the character doesn’t devolve into a stereotypical harridan though, and to underline that Joe’s unhappiness isn’t more justified, and doesn’t deserve more narrative primacy, than his wife’s.
The movie also handles the sexual themes with surprising grace. It head fakes at times towards the raunch-com (what else can you say about a film with running anal sex jokes?) and at other times seems about to suggest that sexual openness or sexual satisfaction can fix relationship problems, or that relationship problems can be reduced to sexual openness and satisfaction.
But—like Wilde’s camera negotiating the curves and corners and windows of the cluttered apartment—the film winds itself towards more subtle insights and revelations about communication, self-loathing, about deciding you, and your partner, deserve pleasure, figuring out what you want. None of this is new, but it’s satisfying to see the one-note punch-line characters grow, or shrink, into more layered skins. Ed Norton does a brilliant job of turning Hawk from a weird skeevy guy, into someone with much more gravitas—before deftly deflating him again.
Women directors remain a rarity in Hollywood, and Don’t Worry, Darling had a rocky critical reception (though it did fine at the box office). The backlash there may explain why The Invite is a smaller, safer and less idiosyncratic film.
Still, Wilde puts her mark on the material. She has fun with the parallels between herself as obsessive director controlling everything and her character as host trying (and mostly failing to control) everything—the film’s trailer opens with Angela inviting guests into the house and also with Wilde (who’s Angela) inviting viewers in. The film includes an awkward, comic (and cramped) oral sex scene on a table which is a deliberate contrast with, or even parody of, the sweeping (in)famous scene with Harry Styles and Florence Pugh in Don’t Worry, Darling.
Like her characters, Wilde’s trying to figure out how to navigate ambition and desire as time moves on and as certain avenues are closed. I hope she gets a chance to work on a bigger canvas again. But it’s also worthwhile to see her work through some of the same ideas, images, and anxieties in a very different setting. She’s an interesting creator; I’m looking forward to seeing how she rearranges the rugs for her next effort.