I gave my thoughts on Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” last Wednesday. It’s a good film. A mostly sharp chamber-piece dramedy with four strong performances (especially Penélope Cruz), it’s spearheaded by Wilde’s confident direction of actors and visual design.
The film is overly stylized and gets slightly repetitive in its middle section, but the final act—the last 25 minutes—is terrific and elevates the entire film. Wilde was clearly inspired by Mike Nichols, particularly “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, to which this film owes a great deal.
Released in limited fashion two weeks ago before expanding into additional markets last week, “The Invite” is now playing wide starting today. That makes this a good opportunity to gauge our readers' thoughts on a film that, as it stands, is one of only three releases this year generating Best Picture Oscar buzz. The others are “Project Hail Mary” and “Obsession,” though that number will likely grow to four next Friday with the arrival of “The Odyssey.”
“The Invite” is set entirely inside a single San Francisco apartment, focusing on a struggling married couple—played by Wilde and Seth Rogen—and their neighbors, portrayed by Cruz and Edward Norton, who are invited over for an evening that ignites unexpected twists and turns, revealing deeply repressed emotions and unexplored sexuality.
All four performances in “The Invite” are excellent, and there are no other actors in this thing—just these four. Rogen is, at first, annoyingly arrogant, playing a washed-up musician whose sarcasm and passive-aggressive defensiveness mask years of frustration. Wilde, playing his wife and the mother of their teenage daughter, gives Angela a tightly wound, wounded nervous energy, portraying a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage. Cruz is magnetic as Piña, effortlessly sexy and disarmingly open. And then there's Norton as Hawk, a charismatic, self-help-guru-esque libertine whose confidence and philosophical musings are, oddly enough, persuasive.
Wilde shot her third feature, following “Booksmart” and “Don’t Worry Darling,” in just 21 days, on film, scene by scene, and in chronological order. The result? A Sundance bidding war, ultimately won by A24 for $12 million, and strong reviews: an 82 on Metacritic and a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Now that “The Invite” is finally opening wide, have you had a chance to see it? If so, what did you think? Is Wilde continuing to grow as a filmmaker, and do you see this one remaining in the Best Picture conversation as the season unfolds?
Just five Cannes competition titles still seek U.S. distribution, four of them subpar, all French. The fifth, and easily the best film still without US studio attachment, is Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love.”