By Jason Osiason

The Invite has all the right ingredients and I kept wishing it had been a little less selfish with them. It all happens inside one San Francisco apartment over one night, a chamber piece about a marriage that’s quietly coming apart, and the setup is outrageous in the best way. Joe, played by Seth Rogen, was a musician once and teaches band now, and Angela, played by Olivia Wilde, is an artist who has been stuck at home long enough to stop calling it that, and the two of them are right on the edge of falling apart when they invite the neighbors from upstairs down for dinner. Those neighbors are Pina, played by Penelope Cruz, and Hawk, played by Edward Norton, and they are glamorous and loud and they have the kind of sex through the ceiling that starts to feel like temptation and escape at the same time to the couple underneath it. One dinner invitation turns into a pressure cooker of jealousy and resentment and desire and brutal honesty as the night drags on and the drinks keep coming.

It’s an obviously personal film for Wilde and that sincerity comes through. The material is tapping straight into the wreckage of a long relationship coming undone, and it’s hard not to see her own very public breakup with Jason Sudeikis all over it. The way the movie dissects the resentment between partners, the exhaustion of performing happiness in front of other couples, the small humiliation of watching somebody else’s freedom up close while you’re sitting there in your own, those moments feel raw in a way that only comes from having lived them. You can tell this is a story Wilde needed to tell, and that emotional honesty is what carries the movie as far as it goes.

The problem is how often it gets in its own way. It’s overwritten and it’s over directed, and in the middle of all that effort it keeps forgetting to be bold and funny with the wild concept that’s sitting right there in the room. Wilde makes herself the emotional center and she’s good in it, but she pays for that with the neighbors. Norton and Cruz should be the chaotic engine of this whole thing. Hawk and Pina should have been allowed to go fully unhinged, and instead they come off oddly restrained, like the film keeps reminding them whose movie it is. So you get a picture that keeps threatening to blow up and mostly doesn’t.

And then the ending hit me like a truck. I fully sobbed. All that emotional honesty Wilde had been building toward finally lands and it completely disarmed me, and the score helps a lot there, Devonte Hynes wrote a gorgeous piece of music that carries the last stretch of this into something moving for real.

It doesn’t completely work, but it works more than it doesn’t.  [B-]