Written by Kashvi Pallapotu. Image by Kashvi Pallapotu.
Savannah Film Festival. Seth Rogen brought warmth to the screening of the funny new film.
While some films get bigger and eventually earn more drama, “The Invite” is a movie that gets all of its emotional weight from a dinner table. It’s Wilde’s third feature, and she really made some smart choices when it came to how to make the little setting work for her film.
Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) are a bickering married couple who invite their upstairs neighbors, Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), over for what they thought would be a simple dinner to introduce their neighbors to each other. However, things do not go as planned. As the night progresses into a heated dinner conversation, Joe and Angela are forced to confront intimacy, honesty, and how well they really know each other. Olivia Wilde’s third feature as director is adapted from the Spanish film “Sentimental” and premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
It’s a great cast, really. Rogen plays Joe, a rumpled, defensive man, but there’s a sense of sadness and longing beneath the surface of the comedic actor. Wilde is also very good as his partner, Angela. She brings a sense of exhaustion to her character, as if she’s constantly fighting the same battles with her husband. Cruz and Norton play the neighbors, Pína and Hawk, who are both magnetic and a little unstable, making for a wildly changing dynamic in the apartment. (It’s also great to see different pairings of the actors in scenes with each other!)
Because this is a single location film, The Invite really depends on the writing and the performances of the four leads. Wilde has managed to create a very confident film that has a lot of great humor but the scenes that really stood out to me were not laugh out loud moments but rather quiet and emotionally intense moments between the characters after they had been laughing where they were left to sit with what had been said. The monologue that Hawk gives at the end about why he is the way he is, followed up by the ridiculous response from Joe is one of the best examples of how this movie plays with depth.
The film itself was great, but Seth Rogen’s panel discussion afterwards was far more impressive. He was his usual warm and funny self on stage, never once coming across as pretentious or superior in any way. His story of entry into acting and to filmmaking is very down to earth and again, very relatable.
A highlight of the evening for this writer was that Rogen provided plenty of insight into how “The Invite” came to be. The actor said that Olivia Wilde had created a film that was true to the collaboration of all four actors involved. They wrote the screenplay together, and in turn, Wilde said that they had rewritten it every day, providing new prompts for each other to work with. All of this was very evident in the scenes of dialogue, which seemed to have been written as if the four actors were riffing off each other in real time.
After establishing that “The Invite” was a very smart film, the most fun part of the night was the “this or that” game that was set up for eight of Rogen’s films. He had to choose one of the options to add to the remaining pool of films. This continued until only one film was left, and the crowd erupted into cheers when he announced that the film would be “Superbad.” “Superbad” is one of the films that many of us in the audience grew up with, and it was fun to see Rogen fully commit to his choices and laugh along with us.
For those who are interested in the making of a film, the insight from the source was fun to hear. A smart and funny film about what partners do and don’t say to each other and wonderful to watch it with its creators.
