“The Invite” Movie Review

That is the reason one should never marry.” The words are from Oscar Wilde, and the movie is from Olivia Wilde, née Olivia Jane Cockburn, who adopted the professional surname years ago, in honor of the many pseudonymous Irish writers in her family. Some might see hubris in her choice of namesake, and I wouldn’t disagree, though I also wouldn’t judge: Who’s to say who is or isn’t truly Wilde at heart? “The Invite,” her third feature as a filmmaker, has its own tart, unflattering view of matrimony. The script, by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, takes the form of a chamber piece, its four bickersome characters confined to one location for the better part of two hours—as close to the Oscar-worthy tradition of drawing-room comedy as Olivia has come.

The drawing room, in this case, is a recently renovated San Francisco apartment, where a married couple, Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde herself), live with their twelve-year-old daughter, Maggie. The kid is away at a sleepover, and Angela has invited the upstairs neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), over for an evening of wine and charcuterie. Joe, grumpily returning from work, claims to be blindsided by this news, though Angela insists that she told him ages ago—the first disagreement of many. She’s a whirlwind of activity and a ball of nerves, slapping his hand away from the hors d’œuvres and berating him for having forgotten to pick up a bottle of wine. Joe, an equally instinctive complainer, is also a shit-stirrer par excellence. The one benefit of having Piña and Hawk over, he reckons, is that he can finally confront them about their noisy sex life.

This particular grievance carries an unmistakable whiff of jealousy, and I was reminded of an earlier comedy, “Neighbors” (2014), in which Rogen plays a husband and a father confronting the rowdy frat guys next door—and feeling, amid his irritation, a twinge of envy and loss. Twelve years later, there’s more salt and pepper in Rogen’s beard and more vinegar in his demeanor; the let-it-all-hang-out comic boisterousness of his Judd Apatow days has hardened into a shell of middle-aged aggression. Joe looks at his pleasant, comfortable life and sees an abyss. Once an indie-rock front man whose band flamed out after one big hit, he now teaches music—cue the sad trombones—at a good-not-great Bay Area conservatory. Even their gorgeous apartment is, for him, an emblem of failure: it’s the home he grew up in, and one that he could never have afforded, only inherited. For Angela, by contrast, the place is her singular creative outlet, the sole use for her otherwise untapped art-school degree. Wilde and her superb production designer, Jade Healy, treat the apartment as a lovingly furnished combat zone, a space malleable enough to convey either entrapment or distance. The living room can turn suddenly cold and cavernous, with Joe and Angela yelling at each other across an emotional chasm. But then we’ll follow them into the closer quarters of the master bedroom, the one unfinished room in the apartment, where Angela has yet to settle on a paint color—a bit of indecision that reads as profound ambivalence about their marriage.