Two couples meet up for an apparently convivial meal, except that there’s a minefield under their feet. And when they trigger an explosion, one of the couples will be left trying to pick up the pieces.
Oddly, this isn’t a synopsis of Kristoffer Borgli’s recent The Drama, though it could be. It’s for the latest project from the actor-director Olivia Wilde, The Invite. In both films, middle-class urbanites have their lives upended and are threatened with being left that way.
Wilde’s film is a chamber piece, beginning with the sounds of two people trying to play a piano duet, then moving to an empty concert hall, where a lone man, Joe (Seth Rogen), is listening to an ensemble rehearsing a piece. He’s uninterested in the result and leaves them to it. For a few minutes, we follow him home on crowded public transport, clutching a folding bike he has neglected to fold, then cycling up and down the hills of San Francisco to his spacious apartment, where his wife Angela (Wilde) is busily preparing a buffet supper to impress the people upstairs. The action then stays strictly within the confines of this apartment.
This is a key detail: what happens inside Joe and Angela’s home is an intensely insular matter — unlike the fallout from Robert Pattinson and Zendaya’s “explosion” in The Drama, which reaches out into every corner of their lives, from family and friends to the cabaret act booked for their wedding reception. They are intensely social beings, with an elevated fixed place in the scheme of things, whereas Joe and Angela have little hinterland and are more like pieces in a game, or elements in an experiment. The game is written into the plot, but is also in their director’s toolset. We are there to see how well these characters can play it.
As with The Drama, there’s a limit to what can be revealed about Joe and Angela’s encounter with the other couple without spoiling what’s ahead. Joe and Angela are clearly at loggerheads but desperate to conceal that from Pina (Penelope Cruz, pictured above, right, with Edward Norton) and her partner Hawk (Edward Norton). These neighbours are having increasingly audible sex, which is starting to make Joe seethe; Angela, though, is impressed by the sheer strength of Pina’s orgasms and defends her right to have them. For the first half of the film, she tries to play the model hostess to her guests, heading off Joe’s attempts to force the subject towards a complaint about their noisy sex. But Pina and Hawk are ahead of Joe and Angela in this game and seductively take charge of it.
Gradually, the comedy recedes and the bare bones of both couples’ relationships are exposed, their desires and anxieties articulated. Joe’s unhappiness is rooted In his sense of failure on all fronts, Angela’s in the loss of excitement in their marriage, especially in the bedroom. Pina’s relatively new liaison with Hawk, a retired firefighter, is not entirely what their neighbours imagined, despite her sophisticated psychologist’s take on other people’s foibles. And their motives for accepting Joe and Angela’s invitation is not what it seems either.
All is conducted with fast-paced panache, the script turning a satirical eye on Angela’s attempts to gentrify her home in the name of “renovation without change”, while Joe keeps up a running commentary on her behaviour that’s a ticker-tape of snark and savage humour. But was he any different before he became this miserable grouch with a bad back?
The two often talk over each other, in a perfectly orchestrated dissonance, while their guests feed in comments too. It’s dizzying at times, showing how quick and practised Joe and Angela’s reflexes are in their combative exchanges, like George and Martha's in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But they are good at avoiding telling us about their real feelings too. The final few minutes of the piece finally expose these and have heft and poignancy, but it's too small a gesture in involving us in Joe and Angela’s fate. We seem to be there to keep up with the dynamic switcheroos of the plot and to applaud the calibre of the acting.
And the performances are first-rate, especially Cruz’s portrayal of a classily sexy, clever woman. The scene where she uses two olives to dramatise why Joe shouldn’t joke about the peri-menopause is a classic. Wilde’s Angela (pictured above, right, with Cruz) is an unexpected ingenue, wide-eyed and overwhelmed by the rarefied atmosphere that surrounds her guests. But we can see that Norton’s Hawk is glib and ambiguously oleaginous, possibly a phoney — Joe triumphantly establishes that Hawk has changed his name from something humdrum. And Rogen shows yet again he is a master of the caustic aside and the bumbling pratfall, though behind his glassy stares there is an occasional hint of genuine sadness as well.
What the piece doesn’t project is a real sense of danger as the game progresses. And it doesn’t have enough of a heart to make us invest that much in its outcome.
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