‘The Invite’ is a Riotous Marriage Comedy

Actress-turned-filmmaker Olivia Wilde’s nearly decade-old directing career has thus far been admirably unpredictable, zig-zagging from zany coming-of-age comedy to horror-tinged sci-fi to, now, domestic farce. One thing has remained the same throughout all the pivoting, though: her fascination with characters aching to loosen themselves from the shackles of an unsatisfying life. In “Booksmart” (2019), Wilde’s acclaimed-but-underseen debut, a pair of goody-two-shoes high-school seniors decides they ought to try out party girlhood before it’s too late, suddenly regretful over how many weekend nights were spent excessively hunched over desks to guarantee 4.0s. In “Don’t Worry Darling” (2022), a clobberingly unsubtle remix of “The Stepford Wives” (1975) whose much-gossiped-out behind-the-scenes drama stole its thunder, a young homemaker living in what may or may not be the early ’60s becomes mountingly suspicious that there may be no escape from her seemingly idyllic life.

Wilde’s latest, and best, movie, “The Invite,” whittles down her pet theme into its most irresistible, affecting form yet. A comedy about the messiness of marital malaise, it’s a millennial answer to Paul Mazursky’s classic swingers romp “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969). (Doing double duty as one of “The Invite”’s quartet of leads, Wilde gives a performance of a piece with Natalie Wood’s in “Bob & Carol”: appealingly game, albeit slightly overstudied-feeling compared to her co-stars.) Almost entirely restricted to a single setting — something that also unearths memories of another seminal ’60s marriage movie, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) — the film has a bare-bones premise. Angela (Wilde), who’s married to Joe (Seth Rogen), invites the comparatively poised couple upstairs, Hawk and Pína (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz), over for dinner.

Angela would like to pretend this weeknight gathering isn’t fraught. She’s slaved away too hard on a soufflé and has too obsessively assembled a pricey charcuterie board, complete with some jamón in a bid to win over the Spanish-born Pína. But it seems doomed to fail from the start, not least because Pína turns out to be a vegetarian. Angela didn’t warn Joe ahead of time, so when he returns home after his punishing commute, collapsing in the foyer because of the chronic back pain his foldable bike has inflamed, he all but demands the night be rescheduled. Not that that would make much difference. One only has to hear a few minutes of his and Angela’s subsequent bickering to know there’s likely no day Joe would be happier with — that there may never come a moment where they actually get to the heart of their frustrations.

Now married for almost 20 years and parents to a never-seen 12-year-old blessedly at a slumber party, Joe and Angela are so profoundly miserable in their marriage that they can’t even pay a compliment to each other without it being met with skepticism. He’s been a sad sack for what’s probably felt like forever. He’s a failed indie-rock musician now instructing at a middling conservatory, and to his embarrassment he inherited rather than earned their big and well-appointed apartment. She’s exhausted by his devotion to self-pity and regrets having done nothing with her art-school degree to be a restless stay-at-home mom. But Angela is desperate to have Hawk and Pína over, mostly because, as she hisses at Joe, they don’t have friends.

Co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, who are in turn adapting Cesc Gay’s much-remade “The People Upstairs” (2020), “The Invite” keeps up a staccato pace for the majority of its runtime. Angela and Joe’s arguing rowdily zips by at a near-screwball clip. And even after Hawk and Pína arrive, a little on edge because of the noisy sparring they couldn’t help but overhear while waiting at the front door, the inevitably tense small talk moves with nervous quickness, only slightly slowed when a little weed is smoked, some wine is drunk, and Xanax is discreetly popped. (I’m not the first to notice that for a dinner where no music plays, except for a couple key moments — one absurd, one melancholic — there isn’t very much dead air in “The Invite.”)

Yet there’s never a feeling of overstylization in the dialogue or that it’s laboring for the laughs that come at a fairly unfaltering pace. Much of that could be attributed to McCormack’s and Jones’ good ears for the ways couples talk, whether they’re on the brink of splitting up or still, like Hawk and Pína, in the honeymoon phase. But perhaps more credit should be given to Wilde’s dialed-in direction and the ensemble she’s part of. The screenplay mandates endless permutations of subterranean acting — signaling to the audience what’s being thought and what wants to be said but, because of dinnertime politeness, can’t be fully blurted out. Empathetic to their uneasy characters, “The Invite”’s actors do the dancing around so well that you don’t really think about the extent to which you could notice their methods of near-telepathic communication with the audience. Blonde-bobbed Cruz is especially good, amusingly playing into her bombshell reputation without tipping things into parody. Her smart and sultry character, a psychotherapist and sexologist modeled after Esther Perel, eventually casts something of an emotional blacklight on Joe and Angela when things get too out of control. The scene recalls, in miniature, TV’s tastefully invasive “Couples Therapy.”

Because there’s nary a moment in “The Invite” without dialogue, it doesn’t quite devolve into the sort of skin-crawling cringe comedy I worried it could become. You’d need way more awkward silence for that. The closest the movie comes is the climax. It’s then that Hawk and Pína, who’d until tonight been best known to their downstairs neighbors for their cartoonishly loud sex parties, reveal that their RSVP involved some saucy ulterior motives. Wilde never slackens her white-knuckle grip on the movie’s tone even as it starts to get narratively screwier as a result, however; things never get so goofy that you don’t believe they’re happening. “The Invite” is both very controlled and spontaneous enough that you feel like anything could happen.

Wilde’s most remarkable trick is saved for the end. The script calls for some real, laid-bare emotion, and it doesn’t feel at odds with silliness coming before it. It wouldn’t be inappropriate to be brought to tears — to leave one’s theater seat with a tendered heart rather than unconsciously grinning with leftover delight. In the wake of “Don’t Worry Darling,” a movie that both strained to get an ultimately simplistic vision across and nearly exploded Wilde’s promising directing career, “The Invite” makes it all seem easy. It’s like Wilde’s getting the last laugh in movie form.

“Maddie’s Secret” so thoroughly and persuasively commits to the bit that I regularly forgot about its essential absurdity and took it at face value. For his maiden feature-directing effort — which he also wrote; produced; and, for its at-home scenes, supplied his own Spanish-style Silver Lake abode — comedian John Early dons normie cis-woman drag to play the title character. From an outsider’s perspective, this chef is living her dream. Her husband (hirsute Edmonds-born actor Eric Rahill) adores her. Soon after the film starts, she’s promoted, overnight, from a replaceable dishwasher to an on-air talent at a Bon Appétit-esque video-content company after her beau nudges her to post an at-home cooking demonstration on social media. Its preparation racking up 600,000 views in fewer than 12 hours, Maddie’s cosmopolitan spin on the tortang talong is, she says with her trademark sunniness, “a little Mexican, a little Filipino, and a little … me!”

Since it doesn’t have very many precedents, “Maddie’s Secret” has predictably drawn comparisons to the campy, low-budget comedies John Waters made in the 1970s and ’80s with the drag queen Divine. But the similarities begin and end with their reliance on an in-drag lead and a sweet spot for pastiche. Waters’ oeuvre passionately courted outrageousness, happy to let its lead actress ham it up with a look-at-me noisiness that once infamously required her to devour fresh dog dung off a Baltimore sidewalk. While frequently very funny, “Maddie’s Secret” errs more toward a kind of heartfeltness that can take you aback. Visually, narratively, and in its fitfully arch dialogue tipping its hat to the issue-forward TV movies of the week of the ’80s, the film sees Maddie’s newfound viral fame reawakening a long-dormant personal battle. During childhood, she was coached into bulimia and compulsive dieting by her gruff, vape-sucking mother (a two-scene-stealing Kristen Johnson). Maddie’s snowballing sensitivity to how she looks on camera, coupled with audience comments that either make fun of or, in the style of a backhanded compliment, applaud her fuller figure, restarts a relationship with disordered eating she’d thought had been left in the past.

“Maddie’s Secret” allocates most of its more in-your-face comedy to the supporting players. Comedian Kate Berlant, who’s Early’s real-life best friend and attached-at-the-hip collaborator, hilariously plays his onscreen one too as an unhinged and possessive lesbian toxically willing to enable her pal slash barely concealed crush’s disease as long as it means staying in her good graces. She’s a master of the eye cross; she knows how to make a smile incite a wave of laughter. As Maddie’s boss and her jealous coworker, respectively, Connor O’Malley and Claudia O’Doherty are hoots as a sleazy oaf who speaks with the obnoxious graveliness of a WWE announcer and a passive-aggressive mean girl who makes sure to accessorize her snidest dismissals with a smile.

Largely, though, “Maddie’s Secret” takes its protagonist’s struggle seriously. Early has spoken of writing it and finding himself bursting into tears, stirred by the emotional places he landed on even as he was lampooning TV-movie clichés and making fun of culinary-media tropes. Early’s portrayal is so free of mockery or condescension that you’re only really taken out of his performance’s fantasy in its very few moments of broadness, like an outsized reaction of terror when Maddie’s husband sneaks up behind her one evening or during some dance-class sessions. The latter are particularly reminiscent of that one time Early and a herd of his comedian friends (Berlant included) near-flawlessly restaged a scene from Paul Verhoeven’s enduringly schlocky “Showgirls” (1995) for no other reason besides the hell of it. (Capped with a curly blond wig and prancing around in a midriff-baring mauve shirt, Early was this funhouse-mirror version’s Nomi Malone.)

“Maddie’s Secret” finds the humor in the melodramatic telefilms it pays tribute to while also making its affection for them and their tormented characters infectiously apparent. Love and unintentionally caused laughter, Early’s movie reminds us, are seldom mutually exclusive. “At any given moment, you can experience it as totally sincere, you can absorb it genuinely and be moved by it, or you can take a little break and step out of it and find it uproariously funny that we’re even doing this to begin with,” Early recently told the Los Angeles Times. That total sincerity, though, has a more-than-probable chance of deterring too long of the type of logical break Early speaks of. He knows how to get you, and keep you, on his eccentric wavelength.

Movie Love is 425’s film column. In 2023, it won first place and in 2026 won second place in editorial & commentary in the magazine category of SPJ Western Washington’s Excellence in Journalism Awards.