Young Xers! Elder Millennials! It’s always all about sex, sex, sex, SEX with them! Opening nationwide now is The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde from a script by married couple Will McCormack and Rashida Jones. McCormack and Jones are in their early-50s, while Wilde and co-star Seth Rogen are in their mid-40s. Just like McCormack and Jones! The Invite is about swingers—not perverts, people who host sex parties in Marin County and consider prosciutto and pegging to be of equal interest and mutual curiosity. Would you like to try some? It’s on the menu.
The Invite begins in an empty high school auditorium, with Rogen watching his students butcher the oboe lesson neither of them really care about. We’re quickly back at his apartment where we’ll be for the rest of the movie. Wilde’s a familiar caricature of a high-strung, unsatisfied middle-aged woman putting too much effort into preparing a spread that four people will never be able to eat. They have guests, you see: upstairs neighbors Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz are coming over for dinner, and they have a casserole. Well, technically they’re just coming over to see the renovated apartment, but this is something Wilde has been working on and talking about for weeks. Weeks? When Norton and Cruz arrive, the latter lets slip that Wilde only asked them over that morning. This is after they stood by the door eavesdropping on Rogen and Wilde fighting. He doesn’t want guests: his back hurts, he calls himself a failure, and within five minutes of the movie you know he’s an insufferable prick. Can’t Wilde do better than this loser? Maybe she’s trying.
Rogen doesn’t like Norton or Cruz. Why? Because they fuck all day and all night. It’s loud, there’s growling, it’s reflecting poorly on Rogen and Wilde, who have a 12-year-old daughter who’s essentially unaccounted for in this little chamber piece Where is she? Camp? An aunt, an uncle? A friend’s house? She doesn’t even come up in conversation that often. Is she their biological daughter? How can Rogen call himself a “failure” and a “loser” when he has a wife, daughter, and an apartment in San Francisco?
Rogen hates that his parents left him a beautiful apartment, says it’s “humiliating;” even worse, he barely plays piano anymore, down on himself and unhappy that he couldn’t manage to make a living in music. Hey, a hit record in 2008 ain’t bad—look at Black Kids. They got onto Letterman! But The Onslaught never made much of an impact on the world, just on Rogen and Wilde: they met at one of his early shows. How does this all come out? Well, Norton and Cruz didn’t just bring a casserole, they brought condoms, too—they’re swingers. “Swingers”? They don’t use that word, and they’re “pretty negative” on the apps. Oh, we’re in woo-woo territory. Norton used to be a firefighter, but retired after his wife died and he had a vision of her repressed sexuality. Really: his dead wife told him to go fuck and fuck as much as possible. Good news for Cruz!
They wanted to fuck, but Rogen and Wilde are too wound up and unhappy. The swingers—sorry, what should I call them again? Communists of cum?—are wary of “bad energy” just like everyone else on the West Coast, and they declare Rogen and Wilde’s marriage “over” for them before leaving, without having eaten a thing or exchanged any fluids. THANK GOD! It’s amazing what these New Age California people think is right, and what they prioritize: Cruz says they should split up for their daughter: “Don’t you think she can feel this?” Whatever “this” is. She dismisses the notion of “staying together for the kids,” and encourages Rogen and Wilde to embrace their selfishness and offload their already absent daughter in lieu of a freewheeling life of group sex where “everything is on the menu,” even “those porn tropes” which Norton and Cruz find “harmful,” or at the very least, “not their thing.”
The Invite is 107 minutes of hot air, a film that plays it safe and politically correct, just like its readymade catalogue swingers (“poly people”?), the kind of yuppies that Norton railed against in Fight Club nearly 30 years ago. Although written by Xers and starring an Xer couple and an elder Millennial couple, The Invite plays every beat set by every piece of Boomer pop culture regarding marriage. There really hasn’t been much movement from “TAKE MY WIFE, PLEASE!” It’s more like a regression: Paul Mazursky was an equally odious free-love sponsor, but the people in his movies were simply smarter, more articulate, and deeper than any middle-aged couple you’re likely to find today. The Invite does manage something remarkable, however: it makes me want to take another look at Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, one of the most repugnant and morally dubious films of New Hollywood. At least those freaks had some brains.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM