The Invite is a sharp, funny look at marriage
Director Olivia Wilde’s third feature The Invite is worth watching for the closing song alone.
It’s the rare 1970 ‘Our House’ demo featuring songwriter Graham Nash and his then girlfriend Joni Mitchell singing an intimate, stripped-down version of the classic song, recorded in her house in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, and remastered in a 50th anniversary luxury edition.
Joni’s giggle at the end of the song makes an exuberant flourish to exit this engrossing living-room drama, about a struggling married couple played by Wilde and Seth Rogen.
Made in the illustrious tradition of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Mike Leigh’s classic Abigail’s Party, The Invite even has an absent child as an important figure.
Marital exhaustion
Adapted from Cesc Gay’s Spanish stage play and film The People Upstairs (Sentimental) by screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, The Invite is psychologically sharp examination of contemporary marital exhaustion.
It stays just on the right side of claustrophobia, thanks to the talented ensemble playing, even though the action never leaves the confined suffocatingly-curated Bay Area apartment setting.
Joe (Seth Rogen), a former indie-rock frontman turned cynical music teacher, and Angela (Wilde), an interior designer whose frantic domestic redecorating masks a deeper existential rot, are a couple who have drifted from love to a sort of resentful, low-grade bureaucracy.
When Angela invites svelte, enviable upstairs neighbours Pina (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) down for an evening of cheese and wine, it triggers a catastrophic lifestyle clash.
Rogen plays Joe not as a caricature of a bitter husband, but with a deeply felt, melancholy defeatism.
The Invite is a genuinely adult comedy with a stellar cast.
Dedicated to Diane Keaton, it edges close to the bone, while staying very human, with consistent heartfelt laughs throughout.
- The Invite officially opens in Irish cinemas on 3 July.