Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, made in 1969, tells the story of two couples, best friends who are navigating the changing mores of the 1960s in Los Angeles. Bob and Carol (played by Robert Culp and Natalie Wood) have gone semi-hippie; they go to New Age retreats, smoke weed, and have decided to practice radical truth-telling. Bob tells Carol he’s had a one-night stand with a Berkeley master’s student but it was only physical; she says she’s okay with it because he was honest. Bob gets offended that she doesn’t care. Then Carol sleeps with her tennis instructor; Bob gets jealous but is assuaged by an offer of free tennis lessons.
Learning of all this, the entirely conventional Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon) are horrified. When they return home after the revelation, they have a 10-minute going-to-bed scene. He exercises, she takes off her makeup, he then wants to have sex, and she doesn’t. “Do you want me to do something against my will?” Alice asks, and Ted—sheepish, hangdog, apologetic—pauses and says… “Yes.”
At the first test screening in Denver, according to cowriter/director Paul Mazursky, there was so much laughter after Ted says it, “you couldn’t hear for five minutes.” When the couples take a trip to Las Vegas, Ted confesses to a one-night stand. At this point, Alice—square, tightly wound, nice Jewish girl Alice—has had enough. She feels left out. Alice takes off her shirt and demands the four of them get into bed and swap partners.
The movie was a sensation. It was up-to-the-minute, it was sexy, it was funny, it felt true. It was one of the first “water-cooler” movies, the kind that people used to go to see so they could talk about it at work on their breaks. It’s dated, as you might imagine, but its combination of social satire and emotional expansiveness constitutes a unique achievement for Mazursky.
Why am I telling you all this? Because there’s a new movie out called The Invite, directed by and starring Olivia Wilde, with Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penélope Cruz supporting her. We’re told The Invite is an adaptation of a 2020 Spanish film called The People Upstairs, but it’s really a pretty naked attempt to update Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to 2026. Does it succeed?
Wilde and Rogen are the squares, whose marriage is in very rough shape. Norton and Cruz are the hipsters who live above them in a San Francisco apartment building and have noisy sexual encounters in the middle of the night—sessions that enrage Rogen and titillate Wilde.
She invites the couple to dinner over his objections. He intends to give them a mouthful; she seems desperate to make friends and make a good impression. The movie proceeds in real time as we watch them meet, exchange niceties, learn things about each other, argue, smoke weed, drink—and consider the sexual possibilities of a foursome.
This is Wilde’s third movie as a director, and her handling of the material (written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack) is expert and fluid. She is actually at her best directing herself as Angela, a walking bundle of need and hunger whose emotional desperation at times threatens to break your heart.
Angela has all but given up trying to make any kind of connection with Joe, with whom she has a 12-year-old daughter conveniently out of the house for a sleepover. They met 15 years earlier when his rock band was playing a gig at a bar and she was on a bad date she escaped from to hang out with him. The band went nowhere, and Joe has ended up a music professor at a third-rate conservatory who confesses at one point that he wants to be miserable because he is a failure who is only able to live nicely in San Francisco because he inherited his parents’ apartment.
Norton is a retired firefighter who is surreally calm and collected and has only been together with Cruz for a year; she was, it turns out, his therapist. They explain how swinging works. It apparently features people gathering together and sharing menus of sexual options from which the participants select before they pair off. Joe alternates between disbelief, moral outrage, disgust, and a kind of hopeless despair listening to all this. Angela just wants something. Anything.
Angela and Joe are interesting and recognizable characters, and the portrait of their crumbling marriage is fresh and vivid. The problem with The Invite is that the swingers are not in the least interesting and seem more like plot conveniences than real people. One revelation about Norton’s character—why his name is Hawk instead of Howard—takes a melodramatic turn that’s almost embarrassing for a movie that wants to be a wild comedy.
Everything funny that happens in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is due to the incredibly sharp dialogue by Mazursky and his partner Larry Tucker. In The Invite, the characters constantly talk over one another as they attempt to cover up their embarrassment or their desires, and while that’s amusing for a while, it just goes on and on as you wait for the movie to get to the Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice point.
Mazursky didn’t know how to end his film and concludes it with a bizarre scene in which the four characters wander onto the Las Vegas Strip as everyone we’ve seen in the movie mills about to the tune of Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” The Invite comes to a thematically proper and dark climax that Wilde immediately tries to take back because nobody likes a bleak comedy.
There are no watercooler movies any longer because a) there are no water coolers any longer, b) almost nobody goes to the movies, and c) if you’re going to have such conversations, they will more likely involve a streaming series or a reality-TV show. The Invite is a nice try to revive the tradition of the provocative sex comedy, but that’s an impossible task. Three generations after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, there’s almost nothing left that would strike us as transgressive enough to shock and amuse at the same time.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary and the Washington Free Beacon‘s movie critic.
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