Every good party starts with expert hosts. This weekend, audiences will receive “The Invite,” Olivia Wilde’s couples dramedy, which revived a sleepy Sundance in January thanks to a riveting four-hander with her costars Penélope Cruz, Ed Norton and Seth Rogen.
The film thawed out critics and audiences in Park City with its examination of marital bitterness and unfulfilled fantasies (sexual and otherwise). It also sparked a tense bidding war before A24 prevailed, acquiring domestic distribution rights for more than $12 million, Variety reported at the time.
The host committee for “The Invite” surely includes screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. The longtime friends and partners adapted Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish-language film “The People Upstairs,” unleashing director-star Wilde and her ensemble on a concept that underscores what makes Jones and McCormack’s writing special: storytelling rooted deeply in their own experiences, delivered in a style that’s brutally honest and never cheesy.
The movie tackles fertility, perimenopause, toxic masculinity, financial strain, female pleasure and disappointment in the way that many marriages eventually seem to. None of it plays like a parlor game or rage-bait, as the genre so often can.
“We both have an internal cheese meter we’re constantly checking in with,” Jones told Variety. “Conversations have to feel like ones real people have. The poetry has to come from the truth.”
This isn’t new terrain for the duo, who wrote their first script sitting side by side at the same laptop. That was 2012’s “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” in which Jones starred with Andy Samberg as college sweethearts whose marriage can’t go on, yet neither wants to give up the other’s friendship.
“The most heartbreaking moments of our lives have also been the funniest,” McCormack said. “‘Celeste and Jesse’ was about the heartbreak of love, and ‘The Invite’ is really about the heartbreak of life. Your parents die; you’re in a long-term relationship; you have kids or you don’t. You’re dealing with the heartache of middle age, and this movie met us at a time when we were ready for it.”
The writers consulted relationship guru Esther Perel on the “Invite” script, in what McCormack called beneficial to both his life and his work. Jones said she and her writing partner emerged with a new appreciation for marriage, which they think the film endorses.
“We want people to evolve, and we want to forgive them. We can do that with kids and with friends. But our partners — those relationships start to get into trouble when we can’t show acceptance. When you can, even if it’s at different pace, that’s an argument to get married,” says Jones.
In terms of their creative marriage, Variety asked what the deal breaker would be for each if they were married to each other in a different life.
“Will and I had the biggest fight in our lives when we were working at Pixar,” Jones said, recalling when she and McCormack were in the “Toy Story 4” writers’ room. “He told me that I bite my spoon too much when I eat. I told him he’s too much of a mouth breather. We were spending a lot of time together.”
As “The Invite” readies for a limited release on June 26 before opening wide, Jones and McCormack have several other projects in the works — including the script for a feature-length “Tom and Jerry” adventure at Warner Bros. Animation. No surprise, they see the war of the cat and mouse as a relationship comedy.
Their Tom and Jerry are each rescued by do-gooders who eventually fall in love. The cat and mouse then launch campaigns to destroy each other and the bond between their owners.
“Tom and Jerry do whatever they can to kill the other or to break up [their owners],” McCormack says. “It’s a rom-com in the style of ‘La La Land.’ Why are these characters fighting so much? Because they want to be seen, and they want to be loved. The logline of our film is literally ‘Love is worth fighting for.’”
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