Really, it’s a sex comedy, for reasons that start to become more clear as the couples finally loosen up and Hawk and Piña explain what’s really causing all that ruckus in their apartment. Piña is a therapist and a “sexologist,” she announces, but she’s also just the living embodiment of everything Angela wishes she was: sensual and confident, forthright and in tune with her own feelings and desires. Hawk is obsessed with Piña, and nearly as obsessed with home decorating. Angela, desperate to be friends with these people, is neurotically fixated on pleasing them, to the alternating bemusement and annoyance of Joe, who has never met a heartfelt statement he couldn’t flip upside down with a joke.
“The Invite” hits some false notes here and there — occasionally Wilde’s performance feels strung too tight, and certain signifiers of banality in Joe and Angela’s marriage seem a little too pat. (These are millennials in San Francisco who met when Joe was in a band that got a little famous; are they really this vanilla?) But for the most part, it’s a romp, rhythmically enjoyable and cleverly directed, with subtle flourishes that build out the characters’ quirks and anxieties. It’s a pleasurable place to spend time inside, too: Joe and Angela’s apartment is set up a little like a rabbit warren, but I never felt lost inside, and the set design was delicious to observe.
More important, perhaps, these four actors are fun to watch together. Each seems to have been told they’re in a slightly different type of movie, and the ways they bounce off one another is unexpected and delightful. Norton is playing his character a bit farcically, while Wilde is in a comedy of manners and Cruz is a sultry romantic lead. It’s really Rogen who’s the revelation, though: His line readings alone fill out Joe’s back story brilliantly, a guy who was always used to being rejected, somehow landed a girl way out of his league 20 years ago, and now is miserable that she doesn’t really want him anymore and he doesn’t like himself, either.
The psychotherapist and relationship counselor Esther Perel is credited as a consultant on the film, and her influence shows rather keenly — not just because Angela mentions, several times, hearing about something marriage- or sex-related on “the podcast.” Speaking about relationships, Piña says that people have many relationships over their lives because none of us stay the same. Sometimes, she says, you start new relationships as you grow. Sometimes, she says, you start a new relationship with the same person.
The movie captures that dynamic well, and a few more facts that sometimes don’t make it into movies that technically are romantic comedies, of a kind. That it’s not conflict but cruelty that will take a relationship apart. That so many couples let whatever drew them together in the first place become the wedge between them. That when kindness flees a home, anyone can feel it.
