Most marriages have those moments: people coming over for dinner; Neither of you are really in the mood. But not everyone realizes that their guests are interested in noisy group sex and want you to join them too.
Olivia Wilde’s wildly funny “The Invite” explores what happens when a husband and wife who have long grown tired of each other find themselves sitting together as a couple obsessed with too much.
The film throws Joe and Angela and Pina and Hawk into a pressure cooker of awkward small talk, simmering anger, and sexual tension with comical and relatable results.
“I think anyone who has been in any kind of relationship will recognize some of these themes,” Wilde told AFP at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film premiered on Saturday.
“We created it as a playful piece to allow people to laugh and get in touch with their emotions, maybe just a little bit.”
Joe, whose band was a minor hit two decades ago, is now a ball of resentment about his life as a teacher at a second-rate music school. He is an angry man with a bad back who no longer touches the piano that once brought him so much joy.
Angela has an art school degree, but she never did anything with it, putting her energy into decorating the San Francisco apartment they inherited from Joe’s parents, and listening with envy to her upstairs neighbor’s earth-shaking orgasms.
When Pina and Hawk arrive for dinner, Angela is desperate to come along and is determined to stop Joe from complaining about the sex sounds those “beasts” make.
But it’s Pina and Hawke who take up the subject, going on to deliver what proves to be the film’s real invitation.
– Improvement –
Will McCormack and Rashida Jones’s groundbreaking script is the outline upon which the A-list cast arbitrarily improvises, delivering a rapid-fire delivery of provocative lines.
Wilde said, “We had this rehearsal period where the six of us sat in a soundstage and we just immersed ourselves in it.”
“Many of the greatest moments of film were written by the artists.”
He said, then when it came to filming, the actors were careless, which made the editing process very difficult.
“There was a lot of embarrassment of riches,” Wilde told the audience. “I had to lose this gold every day.”
Rogen, who told AFP he is “a huge fan of Olivia,” said that when he first signed on to do the film, Wilde was only willing to direct something, but he and Norton were adamant that it wasn’t right.
“Me and Edward were texting each other. We were just, ‘How… do we talk her into being in the movie?'” he told the audience.
“She kept sending us names of other people. I said, ‘Why are you doing this? There’s an obvious person who should be doing this.’
“Then once he decided to get himself into this movie… it really took off.”
Norton said that Wilde’s third directorial project after “Booksmart” and “Don’t Worry Darling” was a masterclass in spinning the plates.
“Seth and I have both directed films in which we are also acting,” he told the audience.
“Inevitably, you come to moments where you say, ‘This was a terrible decision.'”
But that never happened with “The Invite”.
He said, “It’s hard for me to overstate the grace and intelligence with which Olivia delivered that performance and directed us.”
Sundance Film Festival will run till February 1.
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