Scathingly Affecting ‘The Invite’ Asks: Who’s Afraid of Olivia Wilde?

Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” is some kind of great, but it’s being wrongly sold by critics as some kind of wickedly funny, knives-out marital battle-type deal. It is effectively funny, but it’s as much about rage and awkward gulps and hiding and covering stuff up as it is about uproarious zingers and withering, scalpel-like perceptions. Set in San Francisco, it’s about a miserable married couple in their 40s, played by Seth Rogen and Ms. Wilde, inviting a swinging couple (Ed Norton and Penelope Cruz) down for drinks and prosciutto and cheese squares, and before you know it swapping or swinging is on the table. What comes out in the end is the kind of sad, raw feeling that sticks to your ribs.Distributor A24 is keeping “The Invite” out of suburban theatres for the next couple of weeks because they’re convinced that comfortable middle-class rubes will be turned off by sexual candor or emotional exposure or, God forbid, the notion of Ms. Cruz and Mr. Rogen….I can’t say it; I can’t even think it.“The Invite” has been called “Woody Allen meets Virginia Woolf,” but Mr. Allen and his characters, with due respect, never flirted with emotional exposure like Ms. Wilde and her costars do here. We all know what “soft underbelly” revelations are, but “The Invite” really goes there, almost on an Ingmar Bergman-level. Forget the “almost.” It’s a late 1960s or early ‘70s Bergman film with a topical brand of humor that is purely here and now. But the invisible middle word in the title of this film is “misery.” Certainly as far as Ms. Wilde and Mr. Rogen’s characters are concerned. There are moments toward the end — call it the last half-hour — in which Mr. Rogen, of all people, made me feel almost teary-eyed. There’s a scene when Ms. Cruz, a sexologist, caresses his back muscles and shoulders and his lumpy midsection even, and Mr. Rogen just lets it all out. He’s suddenly an adolescent who hasn’t been hugged in a long, long time. I felt for the poor guy. “The Invite” is more of a get-down, tell-the-truth, lay-things-bare movie than a wickedly funny romp, more sad than caustic. The last quarter is almost on the level of an Arthur Janov primal scream session. John Lennon would have loved it. It’s funny as hell, but in an anxious, overlapping dialogue sort of way. It’s certainly one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and is sure to remain on my top ten of the year’s best movies by December. But as a friend rightly observed to me, the Millennial and Zoomer crowd that loved “Obsession” may be reluctant to open themselves up to this. It’s a movie about forty-somethings and fifty-somethings whose lives are kind of on the downswing. Some of the audience out there will go “eeww” when notions of sexuality arise, certainly as far as Seth Rogen is concerned. In fact I almost had a heart attack when Mr. Rogen took his shirt off, revealing he was shaped like a pear.Olivia Wilde is obviously attractive, but she doesn’t look younger than her years. Mr Norton looks like a well-tended fiftyish guy with a nice haircut, which is what he is, of course. Ms. Cruz is the dishiest-looking of them all. But the measure of this film is that it totally forgets about the sexual possibilities during the last third, or was it the last fourth? It ends like “Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf,” but in a more affecting way than what Edward Albee and Mike Nichols were able to conjure in 1966. I felt genuinely touched and massaged by the end. It’s a clever, riotous ride that ultimately melted me down. I felt profound currents of compassion and sympathy for the characters. In box office terms, “The Invite” may not become all that much of a success. It’s completely made for adults over forty, a huge older-person hit waiting to happen, but we all know that adults don’t go to theatres any more. They stopped going during Covid and have never really returned.Ed Norton is 56, Penelope Cruz is 52, Olivia Wilde is 42, and Seth Rogen is 44. They all look it except Mr. Rogen, who always appears ten years older than what he is. But the others are attractive and in good shape as far as it goes. Even if I just don’t know if anyone under 35 will see this and even if it isn’t what I could honestly call a wild laughter riot, this is an awfully damn good “Invite.”

Scathingly Affecting ‘The Invite’ Asks: Who’s Afraid of Olivia Wilde?

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