Here is a four-way sex comedy of embarrassment, as if JB Priestley had written a play about swinging. But as well as embarrassing, it is intriguing, amusing and, finally, somehow bizarrely moving.
Middle class married life is satirised in the personae of two couples having an excruciating dinner party. A failed musician and his wife, played by Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde (who also directs), extend the invitation of the title to their stylish neighbours, a therapist and ex-firefighter played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. Rogen is first among equals in this cast, the ironic insider-outsider perpetually undercutting the situation’s proliferating absurdities with knowing gags or yelps of incredulous outrage, and deploying that unmistakable yuk-yuk-yuk laugh.
Screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones obviously relish setting up each of Rogen’s droll punchlines, and without Rogen to ventilate the film’s atmosphere, the proceedings might have felt oppressively artificial and translated. It is in fact adapted from a Spanish film, The People Upstairs directed by Cesc Gay, itself originally a stageplay (and there has already been a Korean remake of the original movie).
Rogen is Joe, a guy who used to be in a band called the Onslaught, and has now settled for teaching music in a minor liberal arts college and living in his late parents’ apartment. He suffers from depression and a psychosomatic bad back, though the couple’s (off-camera) 12-year-old daughter is pretty much the sole bright spot in his life. Angela (Wilde) has prepared an elaborately casual soiree for their supercool neighbours Piña (Cruz) and Hawk (Norton), to grumpy Joe’s baffled resentment. Angela’s ostensible purpose is to apologise for the noise she and Joe made with their recent renovation – but Joe, in his passagg way, now intends to invite Piña and Hawk to make their own apology for keeping him awake with their inconsiderately noisy and uninhibited sex.
It is the subject of sex which is to take the conversation in unexpected directions. Cruz and Norton enjoyably show how Piña and Hawk are intimidatingly, effortlessly bohemian and progressive; they have an unbearable habit of relapsing into Spanish in front of their hosts, a habit which is of course rude, but always makes them look impossibly cosmopolitan and suave. Where Piña and Hawk are serenely unruffled and superbly confident, poor Angela and Joe are sweaty and uptight, and mortified and irritated at how parochial they are made to feel. The scene is surely set for an awful culture clash. Yet that isn’t exactly what happens.
In some ways this is a clamorous, querulous, overcaffeinated movie; it takes its time to settle down, and in fact begins by having almost every line of dialogue jarringly punctuated with a musical score – an oppressive mannerism which thankfully doesn’t last very long. It is certainly broad, stagey and contrived, and the mood shifts are almost like dinner-theatre in their suddenness – yet Rogen’s comedy credentials mean that the pure outrageousness of the twists and turns are palatable.
The Invite resembles Roman Polanski’s four-hander Carnage from 2011, adapted from Yasmina Reza’s stageplay – or indeed Francis Veber’s play and film Le Dîner de Cons, remade as Dinner for Schmucks with Steve Carell. Maybe there’s something about bourgeois people being embarrassed over dinner that has a certain exportable appeal. The Invite is funny … and Rogen is on top of his game.
