Oscar voters…don’t forget to RSVP to “The Invite.”
“The Invite,” Olivia Wilde‘s third feature as a director and the most sleek and assured work of her career behind the camera, is an indie film with a lot to say. Oscar voters shouldn’t be afraid to listen. A24, the distributor that bought the film out of Sundance, has a real decision to make. Does it treat “The Invite” like a summer fling or like the awards player it plainly can be?
The second option is clearly, the right one.
When “The Invite” premiered at Sundance in January, it drew an enthusiastic standing ovation, not always a given in Park City, where the air is too thin and too cold for that kind of thing. It then led to a multiday bidding war, which A24 won for a reported $12 million.
An English-language remake of the 2020 Spanish film “The People Upstairs” by Cesc Gay, the film tells the story of Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Wilde), a long-married San Francisco couple fraying at the seams, who invite their magnetic upstairs neighbors Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penélope Cruz) down for dinner, and the evening detonates.
Variety’s chief film critic Owen Gleiberman compared it to a modern-day “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in his review, and critics across the board reached for the same lineage. It’s an earned comparison, but what Wilde’s film does almost defies the impossible: It stays funny while it draws blood. That’s something industry voters can respond to in this modern Oscar era.
Wilde has never directed with so much control.
She turned some heads with her 2019 directorial debut “Booksmart,” which picked up a bit of awards recognition on the circuit with nominations in places like the WGA and BAFTA Awards for original screenplay (Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Katie Silberman) and the Golden Globes for best actress (musical or comedy) for Beanie Feldstein. Her next behind-the-camera effort, “Don’t Worry Darling,” didn’t fare as well with critics. But both of her previous features have been profitable, with “Booksmart” earning $25 million globally on a $6 million budget and “Don’t Worry Darling” earning $88 million on a $30 million budget.
With “The Invite,” she gets to stretch herself as a filmmaker and an actor. The whole picture unfolds in one apartment across one night, and she stages it like a chamber piece that refuses to remain stage-bound, working through mirrors and doorways. It is also her best performance as an actor since the indie drama “Meadowland” in 2015. As Angela, she is raw, self-deceiving and yet very funny, never once letting the director’s hand shake her actor’s nerve.
However, the engine underneath it all is the crackling script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, who first showed their magic together co-writing the indie rom-com “Celeste and Jesse Forever.” McCormack later won an Oscar for the animated short “If Anything Happens I Love You,” which he co-directed with Michael Govier. Reunited here, he and Jones deliver their finest hour yet. The dialogue crackles like a live wire, the structure merciless and quick-witted, as energetic as something we might have seen Aaron Sorkin pen. The laughs never stop coming, and in a season that will reward originals and adaptations alike, this is the writing voters will remember when casting their ballots in January.
But even a great script can be lost without the right actors attached, and thank God for this foursome.
Rogen delivers his best acting work on film since “Steve Jobs” (perhaps of his career), trading his usual slouch for a bruised, genuinely evolving performance. Long gone are the days when he’s merely the stoner from “Pineapple Express” and “Knocked Up.” And while still a “recreational user” in this film, he delivers his lines with bite. If the film keeps picking up steam and breaks out into the cultural zeitgeist, and if he comes off his history-making Emmys haul for the first season of the Apple TV comedy “The Studio,” I wonder if there can be a rallying cry to get the 44-year-old multi-hyphenate his first career Oscar nomination. The Golden Globes, at the bare minimum, could likely take the bait on a performance like his. But perhaps it can go further?
Four-time Oscar nominee Norton, cheerful and contemptibly swaggering as Hawk, gives his most vivid screen turn since “Birdman.” And Cruz, as a sex therapist who turns the evening into a confessional, is operating at a level she has not reached since “Parallel Mothers,” all serenity and steel. This will be a huge year for the Oscar winner of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008), as she’ll also have the Cannes winner “La Bola Negra” on Netflix, and Florian Zeller’s next project, “Bunker,” alongside her husband, Javier Bardem. It’ll be interesting to see whether the new acting branch amendment, which allows multiple performances to be nominated in the same category, could put her at the front of the line come Oscar season.
With these four actors, there are zero weak links.
Every one of the artisans is essential to the awards case and worthy of a look. The editing by Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Yorgos Lanthimos’ longtime cutter and an Oscar nominee for “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” along with co-editor Anthony Boys, gives the movie its palpable energy. They find the comic timing and the emotional whiplash in the same cut. Adam Newport-Berra’s cinematography turns a single set into a visually alive space, using the actors’ faces as canvases for a soulful story. Moreover, Devonté Hynes’ score, which is both anxious and playful, does the tonal heavy lifting without ever announcing itself, which is something the music branch can discover and appreciate.
I would love to see “The Invite” become a production design player, too. Jade Healy built an entire San Francisco apartment that functions as a fifth character in the ensemble. Contemporary production design rarely breaks through at the Oscars, where the branch tends to reward period grandeur and fantasy worldbuilding. Some rare exceptions prove how special that recognition is, such as “Her” in 2013 and “The Father” in 2020. It deserves to join those ranks.
None of this happens on its own. Awards runs for films like this are built from the inside out, not discovered. A24 should know better than anyone how to build one, given how it turned a sci-fi action-comedy with butt plugs and flying dildos into one of the most awarded best picture winners of the modern era in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
Like a good party planner, A24 has to get the invites out early and let people fall in love with the unmissable party of the summer (and year).
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