The Invite: Couples Therapy with Witnesses and Bad Table Manners

Joe does not want company. Angela has invited the upstairs neighbors anyway. It’s a miserable starting point for a pleasant evening and a pretty good one for a comedy. Olivia Wilde herself plays Angela in The Invite, Seth Rogen is Joe, and Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton get the pleasure of being guests at a couple who should have had the conversation before setting the table.

I feel about the perfect host couple the way I feel about a LinkedIn update about a fantastic workplace: the more effort goes into convincing me, the more I want to hear from the person who isn’t saying anything. A dinner table is a tiny, efficient press office. You can sell your version of the relationship while the other person sits there passing the salad.

Joe, your disappointment doesn’t pay the rent

Joe is stuck in a musical dream that did not become what he had hoped. I want to understand him. I just don’t want to give him the whole apartment in which to be disappointed.

The failed male artist enjoys an impressive line of credit in culture. Bad moods can pass for depth for years without anyone asking for proof. I’m not buying it on installments. Joe is allowed to mourn the life he did not get. He just still has to be bearable to live with. A lost career should not grant a lifelong right to be insufferable.

So Angela gets my sympathy first. After all, she is trying to make something happen. On the other hand, it’s impressive to choose an untested soufflé and charcuterie for a vegan when the evening is already under pressure. I would start with pasta. It rarely has to confirm your worth as a human being.

But Angela does not get a moral Michelin star for having cooked. I like her determination to make something happen; I have a harder time with the idea that the other person therefore owes her cheerfulness. If the recipe for a successful evening requires your partner to take on a new personality, the problem is probably not the soufflé. Care becomes suffocating when it arrives with a job description.

It works both ways. He can use his disappointment as an excuse to check out; she can turn her composure into an accusation. Then you have two people, each with a perfectly reasonable explanation, and they are utterly impossible to be around. That conflict has more bite than yet another story about a couple who just need to learn how to communicate. They are already communicating. Quite violently, in fact.

An open relationship is not a personality test

The upstairs neighbors Pina and Hawk have arranged their love differently. In an interview with Soundvenue, Norton describes their relationship as non-monogamous and non-possessive. Wilde points to the difficulty of talking about sex with the person you are actually having it with. The latter interests me more than the number of possible participants.

I have nothing against people designing their sex lives creatively. But I check out if openness becomes yet another lifestyle one has to perform correctly. You do not automatically become generous because you are in an open relationship. You can also be a self-absorbed idiot with a very flexible calendar. Conversely, fidelity is not a quality stamp if you spend the rest of the relationship making the other person feel small.

That is why I will not crown the upstairs neighbors winners in advance. Their freedom is most interesting as a provocation: what if some of what Joe and Angela call normal is simply something they have stopped discussing? That is a question worth the trouble. It does not require anyone to sign up for group sex. Maybe it only requires listening to a desire without immediately demanding an apology.

I want that conflict to mess with my own sense of fairness too. Angela is easy to defend when Joe fills the room with disappointment. It is harder to ask whether her version of the good evening leaves him any room at all. That is where the premise touches something I cannot just nod wisely at. A film that only confirms who is annoying might as well be my group chat.

I want the bad line too

A chamber piece has to do more than have an opinion about marriage. Four famous actors in an apartment can also become a long evening of expensive faces. Time Out’s Phil de Semlyen praises the way the camera and the actors’ placement distribute attention. That is the formal argument I care about: the reaction has to have room beside the line. Otherwise the film just rewards the fastest person in the room.

And I have reservations about the very well-written conflict. Soundvenue’s Luna Ehlers points to an abundance of punchlines and a few forced serious points; de Semlyen also finds the late turn toward seriousness uneven. That lowers my research-based assessment. I want room for a stupid remark that is not rescued by the script. People in crisis are not always entertaining. They should not have to be in order to deserve attention.

Four stars. Do the dishes yourself

My verdict is four out of six stars. The confined format and the conflict over who gets to be the reasonable one give The Invite a strong idea. My reservations about the density of the dialogue and the shift toward seriousness keep me from calling it unqualifiedly successful.

I would choose it for an evening when there should be something to disagree about afterward. Not as a test of whether your own relationship is modern enough. I can’t be bothered with that competition. I would rather discuss why it is so tempting to get strangers to think you are a good partner when the person you are actually with is on the verge of giving up.

The guests have to go home eventually. And someone still has the dishes.