The Invite

September 2 – 3

Two Days Only

Wed Sept 2 – 3:30 & 7pm
Thurs Sept 3 – 1:30 & 7pm

Comedy / Drama / Romance
Rated 14A — 1 hr 47 min

The Invite is an A-list ensemble comedy about an electrifyingly hilarious couples night gone wrong. Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton are exceptional in a smart and funny winner about sex, marriage and partner-swapping. It’s a film about two adult couples negotiating anxieties surrounding sex with other people –it’s really, consistently funny and stylishly directed, made with the kind of care and rigidity that comedies just aren’t afforded now.

It’s a mostly one-location comedy, but Wilde shoots on 35mm (!) and works with Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) on the score, as well as four-time Oscar nominee Arianne Phillips on costumes, Yorgos Lanthimos editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, who previously brought an epic sweep to The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Splitsville. Not that the sharp and fastidious script from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack needed such elevation to distract (this is no Don’t Worry Darling), but it just gives the film this wonderfully glossy, classic feeling – a given decades ago but a miracle now.

When you go into a movie knowing that it’s about two couples who get together for a dinner party, there are certain expectations about what’s going to happen that are just about wired into our moviegoing DNA. You expect that the dialogue, for a while, is going to be light, funny, brittle, caustic. You expect that as the evening wears on, the masks of civility will come off, revealing something more painful and maybe brutal under the surface. You expect that there might be serious flirtation (between the people who aren’t partners), and that the whole thing will wind up structured as a kind of truth game. And you expect that by the end, there will be wreckage…but maybe, in that destruction, a kind of healing. This is a film that is a movie that lives up to every one of those expectations. Yet it does so in a way that’s so original, so brimming with surprise.

There is nimble choreography to how everyone quips, crosstalks, interrupts and trails off, the kind of film that could be easily mistaken as semi-improvised were you not listening intently to the carefully crafted, detail-packed dialogue. Every aside reveals something, (almost) every joke lands, and every actor is working intently at making every moment count  All four of the actors are amazing. Rogen, while rooted in his vintage persona of crusty rationality, has never explored it this deeply. Wilde, who’s a spectacular actor, imbues Angela with so many frazzled shades of desire and unhappiness and dreams she’s still clinging to that her performance is like a blur that gradually comes into beautiful focus. Norton gets us giggling at Hawk’s Zen cowboy certitude, until we hear his own backstory, in a monologue you listen to in a spellbound hush. And Cruz, whose Pína is the catalyst of all this, projects an erotic life force that comes with its own gamesmanship. It’s Pína who says, in essence, that some relationships need to die so they can come to life again as something else.

The Invite is marvellously entertaining, but part of the reason for that is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves mirrored in this movie, which for all its sharp-tongued bravura is humane enough to play a truth game that rings true.