Noisy Neighbors

The Invite a film by Olivia Wilde.  With Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz, Seth Rogan, Edward Norton.  Streaming on Prime, for a cost.  *****

The Invite is beautifully acted and directed, hilariously funny, with a tight script and unrelentingly rapid pace that just won’t quit; you’d like to slow it down every few minutes just to catch up on all the jokes.  It’s a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for our time, shot in one apartment, where two couples (sometimes one couple) sweat it out.  It is apparently a remake of a Spanish movie that has been redone several times; the idea itself is brilliant.  It’s both hilariously funny and deeply true; you hardly have time to stop laughing before you start crying.  I’m sure there are more important or inventive movies that have come out this year, but there is none that I enjoyed more.

Joe (Seth Rogen) is a failed musician who had a big hit early in his career but at this point is stifled in his creativity and stuck at a second-rate music-conservatory teaching wannabe musicians.  That’s his characterization of the situation, which we hear late in the movie; his wife objects but he won’t hear of it.  Angela (Olivia Wilde) fell in love with him in the early days, and as the movie opens, we hear (I think) a scene from those days where they’re doodling on the piano and having a wonderful time, very much in love.  That time is long gone in the present.  Angela went to art school but has abandoned the photography that she began with; she expresses her creativity now by creatively decorating the apartment they live in, adding details that Joe neither notices nor cares about.

In the only scenes that don’t take place in the apartment, we see Joe dismissing a class that he’s teaching at the conservatory (he gives some lackluster praise, then tells them to play the piece a couple more times after he’s left) and struggling home on the hills of San Francisco on a foldable bicycle (the same hills as in Bullit, but at a rather different pace).  Joe has a bad back and is mildly overweight; by the time he gets home all he wants to do is collapse.  But his wife has invited their new neighbors over for dinner, thinking she has told Joe and asked him to bring wine, but apparently not.  They hardly know these people and have seen them primarily in the elevator.  They’ve been meaning to have them over, and tonight is the night.

They worry that recent renovations in their apartment have been noisy for their neighbors and want to apologize.  But they also want to bring up—at least Joe does—an issue of noise with the neighbors themselves; they’ve been fucking so loud in the wee hours of the morning that it wakes everyone up, including their daughter (who’s off with some friends for the evening).  This is a sore subject especially—we suspect—because Joe and Angela aren’t fucking much themselves.  Anglela is at least expressing her creativity in the apartment but Joe—though he obviously has a gift—isn’t expressing himself at all.  He doesn’t even play the piano anymore, and his studio is off limits to everyone else.

Into this dreadful situation come the neighbors, Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton).  In comparison to this angry stifled couple, they seem mellow and utterly relaxed (late night fucking will do that for you); they’ve brought a flan and themselves, but if this night isn’t convenient (they can feel the tension in the air), they’ll come back another time.  Angela has spent the whole day putting together a platter of charcuterie, cheeses and a special jamon for Pina, but as it turns out she is the dinner guest from hell: she doesn’t eat meat, dairy, or gluten (she can’t even eat the crackers).  A bowl of olives is about the only thing in the house that she can eat.

Angela is adamantly opposed to bringing up the sex noises at all.  She wants to get to know their neighbors and says they can bring the noises up later.  Joe is far more worked up about the subject, reflecting, I think, his disappointment with life in general.  If he’s not fucking and making music, he doesn’t want anyone else doing it either.  He finally does bring it up (and in fact his neighbors know he was angry); as it turns out, the situation is more complicated than he had thought.

In a movie that is absolutely loaded with laugh lines (Joe is a brilliant person, and his brilliance displays itself in sarcastic humor), I thought the funniest was one that isn’t ostensibly a laugh line at all, delivered by Pina.  “I am a psychotherapist and a sexologist.”  If Penelope Cruz said such words to me, I’d be flabbergasted, probably speechless, then say, “You are a sexologist?  I’m not sure what that involves, but could I get an appointment?”  And though we’re used to sexologists who look like Dr. Ruth, it’s quite another thing when Penelope Cruz is one.  Excuse me, lady, but how did you get into this line of work?

Everything she says from then on about relationships and sex seems right on the money to me.  Hawk has been her patient—Joe sputters at that—but now he’s her partner, and they’re happy indeed (though not above their own spat, which they have late in the movie and which humanizes them).  The movie doesn’t become more serious when Pina reveals how things got started for them.  It just becomes more interesting.

It becomes serious when Joe—ever wielding the sarcasm—insists that Hawk can’t be the man’s real name.  He also can’t believe he was a firefighter because the man doesn’t seem macho enough, and he asks Hawk, whose given name was Howard, where he got his new name.  Hawk’s answer, a long monologue about his past, was to me the most moving moment in the movie (followed, naturally, by a sarcastic remark from Joe) and took things to a whole new level.  I don’t think it spoils anything to mention Pina’s final pronouncement on Joe and Angela, which stays with us long after the movie is over.  “I think we only get a few chances at meaningful relationships, usually we move to different people, sometimes we can have a new relationship with the same people. But I think this relationship is over.”

I know it seems I’ve given a lot away, but I haven’t given away the most exciting and hilarious thing, which really is the heart of the movie.  Let me just say that the title doesn’t refer to Angela inviting Pina and Hawk to the apartment, as for a long time I thought it did.  It refers to another invitation, which changes the evening into something else altogether.

Then again, it doesn’t.  It deepens everything and changes nothing.