Long day’s journey into spite

Joe and Angela bicker in an apartment. They’re having Pina and Hawk, the couple from upstairs, over for a meal. But Angela hasn’t told Joe. The marriage is obviously in trouble.

The Invite (15), a remake of The People Upstairs, plays out like ‘Ninety Shades of Virginia Woolf.’ As the day goes on and the masks slip away, secrets – mainly voyeuristic – come out. We’re presented with sex as a solution to their problems, the more experimental the better.

Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton are Pina and Hawk – or is he really Howard? – in this play-on-film. It has some comic moments, but its credentials towards being an insight into a crumbling marriage are too flimsy. A gentle nod towards reconciliation in the final reel is too little too late.

Seth Rogen – Paul Giamati would have been better – is Joe, the Mr Ordinary of the piece. He’s a disgruntled music teacher unhappy in the cloying routine of his job, his marriage and even the apartment, which he inherited.

Initially appearing as a victim, thereafter he becomes just as mediocre as everyone else. Wilde goes before the camera as well to play his hysterically domesticated wife.

Is her Lady Macbeth-style behaviour hiding some deeper malaise? Yes, we’ve been here before.

Pina says “I’m not a therapist” at one stage, but you could have fooled me. She spends most of her time telling Joe and Angela what’s wrong with them from her pseudo-intellectual perch at the top of Dr Ruth’s advisory tree, purveying a very sixties form of counselling in her advocacy of wife-swapping as the pill to cure all marital ills, and the Kama Sutra its orgiastic playbook.

Hawk is the fourth member of the self-obsessed quartet. Supercilious in the extreme, he wears a semi-permanent sneer on his face, forever waiting for Joe to embarrass himself some more so he can kick him while he’s down.

Wilde works hard to give us a heady vivisection of a marriage. The script is clever before it descends into prurience. It throws its best punches in the first third but becomes gratuitous in the middle. Towards the end, it develops pretensions towards didacticism.

By this stage it’s hard to care about any of them. I found myself becoming nostalgic for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice from 1969, a time when a satire about free love didn’t take itself quite so seriously. And was more subtly self-referential.

When you think about it, that’s the main problem with The Invite. It throws bawdy sex in our face for an hour and then purports to tell us you can fulfil yourself better by playing the piano. Duh.

If you want to see a really funny film about a couple visiting another couple and watching them all turn into children, rent out Roman Polanski’s four-hander, Carnage.

The present offering, despite solid performances all round, is really just a rehash of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for Slow Learners.