“One should always be in love,” reads the quote by Oscar Wilde that opens the rancid new comedy-drama The Invite. “That is the reason one should never marry.”Of course, works of art about unhappy marriages have been produced since time immemorial, but many earlier entrants existed within societies that still regarded healthy, contented marriages as the norm. For example, in Edward Albee’s 1962 play (and the 1966 film by Mike Nichols) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the splenetic antagonism of the middle-aged academic couple George and Martha was shocking because it was not assumed to be a natural state of affairs. Their marriage, weighed down by deception and vengefulness, was clearly an anomaly. Yet countless contemporary movies, from Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999) to Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), take marital decay as a given and assume that, far from being shocked by it, many viewers will relate to it. Sadly, that assumption is probably correct, but it doesn’t make the movies worthwhile.
With The Invite — a remake of a 2020 Spanish-language film that has happily escaped my notice — director and costar Olivia Wilde makes further, creepier assumptions: that some audiences have become so desensitized to aberrant behavior that they will not only accept the central couple, Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde), and their expressions of hostility and indifference but will tolerate other once-transgressive behavior, such as casual marijuana use among characters coded as non-losers, open marriages, and even so-called “sex parties,” all of which are plot points in this profoundly bad movie.Penelope Cruz and Olivia Wilde in “The Invite.” (Courtesy of A24)
