In the fall of 1962, Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway. While the New York Times reviewer wrote that “you may not be able to swallow Mr. Albee’s characters whole,” the play itself was “a wry and electric evening in the theater.”
Much the same can be said for The Invite, a film directed by the actress Olivia Wilde from a screenplay co-written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and adapted from a Spanish play by Cesc Gay.
That may sound like an overstatement, comparing a movie directed by Wilde and starring her and Seth Rogen to one of the great works of American theater. And, of course, it is. That said, the comparison is inevitable. Albee’s play features four characters, two of whom are invited by an older couple for late-night drinks and, over the course of the evening, all hell breaks loose.
The furor happens gradually but does so finally and fully, betraying the fragile relations between both couples, husbands and wives, but especially between George and Martha, brilliantly played in the 1966 Mike Nichols-directed film adaptation by Richard Burton and the Oscar-winning Elizabeth Taylor.
In Wilde’s film, the couples are Joe and Angela (played by Rogen and Wilde) and Piña and Hawk (played by Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton). We meet Joe and Angela first. He is a music teacher at a San Francisco conservatory, and while we learn that he once was a musician with hopes of a performing career it’s clear from the start that he is unhappy – dissatisfied and in a deep funk, though we don’t know exactly why.
Things start to become clear when he arrives home and is almost immediately chastised by Angela. She apparently has invited their upstairs neighbors over dinner and wonders why Joe hasn’t brought any wine even though, she claims, she’d asked him to do so. Things devolve from there in that kind of domestic I-said-you-said loop that is a front for more serious, underlying emotions.
Part of what bothers Joe is that the neighbors who have been invited are the same ones who have been making a ruckus during the night, so much so that Joe even once visited their front door, knocked loudly and then ran away. It’s an action that he initially denies doing, even when confronted by a video.
But denial along with unspoken, unmet dreams and desires are at the heart of what Joe and Angela call a marriage, a relationship poisoned by Joe’s refusal to acknowledge the failures of his musical past and Angela’s inability, or unwillingness, to confront her own frustrations over just about everything.
As with Albee’s George and Martha, their domestic wrangling involves a sour cocktail of emotions that comes to light as the evening progresses and the true meaning of the movie’s title – The Invite – is revealed.
It’s easy to see that Wilde’s film was originally devised as a stage production. Most of what we see is confined to the few rooms of Joe and Angela’s apartment, Mostly, then, Wilde has her camera follow the actors as they move in and out of the frame. Sometimes she’ll resort to intense close-ups, while at others – typical of live theater – her camera will focus on a lone character who then performs a monologue.
It’s to Wilde’s credit that she cast her film well. Known mostly for his comedy, Rogen proves adept at portraying a more dramatic side here. Having played a number of haughty characters over the years, Wilde is able to make Angela into a distressed mix of vulnerability and need yet worthy of our empathy.
For her part, Cruz plays Piña – whose role as a sexologist becomes key to what occurs in the film – as a knowing, no-nonsense force. Yet if there is a standout performance, it belongs to Norton, whose character’s soulful admission of his past grief and recovery is the film’s singularly powerful moment.
As with George and Martha, Joe and Angela in the end are left to ponder their future, either alone or together. And while they may not have the gravitas of Albee’s characters, they do – with the help of Wilde’s direction – end up creating more than a few “wry and electric” moments all their own.
“Movies 101” host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.