'The Invite' Story Analysis

Last week I took myself off to watch The Invite at The Phoenix in East Finchley. (Tiny screen, maybe 40 seats, full of mostly old ladies. It was 5.45pm on a Tuesday. Is that significant?).

I only mention the old ladies because I was sat between two of them, munching popcorn, and I couldn't help wondering what they made of Penelope Cruz and her wild orgasms, proposing a foursome to Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde in their filmically stunning apartment.

The film is a four-hander tracking the night a marriage implodes. You know from the beginning the couple are doomed. Maybe from the moment he forgets to buy the wine, or probably before that when she steps over his feet as he lays prone in the hallway, indifferent to the pain she's inadvertently caused by buying him the bike he resents.

It reminded me of Closer (2004), Patrick Marber's film adaptation of his own play exploring similar territory: marriage in trouble, dramatized almost as a four hander. There's a moment I've never forgotten:

Anna (Julia Roberts): "Why are you dressed?"
Larry (Clive Owen): "Because I think you might be about to leave me, and I didn't want to be wearing a dressing gown."

I love the line. It’s so vain, pathetic, and uncomfortably real.

The Invite has its own version of this. Penelope Cruz invites Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde to join her and Ed Norton for a foursome. Seth Rogen can't believe it. 'Me?' he asks. 'And me?' As if, we can all see why you'd want Olivia Wilde, but AND me too???

It's wonderfully honest and funny. But it doesn't quite have the dressing gown's quotable, universal, painfully recognisable sting.

In any case, the old ladies munched on, unamused.

I enjoyed the film. The casting was perfect, performances great, costumes well chosen. The mise en scène matters hugely in a film like this because the invitation to the audience is as much about the visual language as the story. Olivia Wilde's shirt. The sofa choices in the apartment. All of it perfectly calibrated and nice to look at.

The story evolves like a beautifully carved piece of marble, each escalation another chip at the carapace of a relationship that has long ago died. But perhaps that's my (picky) problem with it.

Might it have been more thrilling had we seen more of what Cruz and Norton were actually inviting the others into? In Closer we get the spectacle of Natalie Portman dancing for money. We get the thing itself.

Or, might it have been better, more suspenseful, if there were some slither of a chance that Olivia and Seth might decide to stay together – that there was something over the course of the mad evening that helped them return to the spark?

When I pay my money to leave my house, I want to be titivated, energised, scandalised, seduced, horrified, transported, mesmerised. I want to feel - deeply, energetically.

The Invite is a great film. It just didn't quite make me (or my old ladies) choke on my popcorn.