They plan a date night. Dinner and a show, as the Yanks have it. Only in reverse. Cinema, for 5 00 pm screening, then dinner in Saffron, a favoured Indian restaurant. This their first date-night in a while. They look forward to it.
He experiences a foul-up with an insulin pen, just prior to leaving home. He misplaces an essential part, which throws him off. She walks to the cinema and gets tickets and popcorn. He follows on his mobility scooter and experiences further difficulties, while manoeuvring it in/out of the lift in the cinema.
They sit and settle. They eat some popcorn, allow the car ads to wash over them, then focus on the opening scene of The Invite, chosen from the thin selection available and influenced by a decent review in The Irish Times.
Two middle-class, white American thirty something couples skewer each other on spits of embarrassment. One couple perceives the other as ‘cool’, an ineffable but vital attribute for happiness in their world.
The film doesn’t catch them.
Lame jokes about hyper-business and noisy love-making fill the opening scene. It appears you’re not enjoying sex unless you are guldering loudly and thumping the headboard off the wall. There is a lazy joke about jamon you can see coming from a mile off. It’s no surprise that it lands lamely. No one in the cinema laughs.
Embarrassment is the high point of comedic achievement, whereby the only laughs arrive for failing to be, while yearning to be, ‘cool’, in this comedy (sic!) of male and female impotence, sexual and social.
Both couples strive haplessly and helplessly, to different degrees, in their attempts to be ‘hip’, while simply affirming middle-class conformity, conservatism and materialism. They don’t realise how lucky they are.
The cinema-goers are restless. They sense the film is not for them. They are the wrong demographic for this well-regarded work. She gets fed up of the constant, repetitive bickering among the characters, especially around the lame jamon joke, worn to shreds and stretched to snapping. He doesn’t take to the lead male, right from the start when he behaves boorishly to music students.
They leave the cinema, after about twenty minutes. The act of walking out of a cinema produces a righteous mix of disappointment and relief. They don’t do it often. He has form, having walked out on George Clooney in Up in the Air.
They don’t learn the ending of The Invite. They think its unlikely to be happy, in any meaningful, personal way, as the characters do not desire to be happy, in any meaningful, personal way. They desire to be ‘cool’, as a substitute for being happy.
There is an absent child, away from home on the evening the two couples meet. They leave before the absent child has a chance to appear.
She saves the date by suggesting an Indian take-away meal and a film at home. His insulin injection disruption is overcome by retrieving the mis-placed piece of kit. They find Safe, with Jason Statham playing Luke Wright, as a blue collar Tom Cruise on the tv.
The film is accompanied with an inexpensive Bordeaux red, making the excellent food go down readily in spite of the criminality and corruption, violence and vice portrayed. Safe succeeds as a send-up rather than a representation.
There’s a serious conversation to be had about the merits of this form of entertainment, but this is not a serious film. It has a winning ‘heart of gold’, using ‘caring for a child’ as a core element. Catherine Chan plays Mei. The child is essential to the plot, in jeopardy at all times and acting to save herself and Luke Wright (Jason Statham).
It is fantasy escapism, with more bust-ups than hacks, shoot-outs rather than high wire acts, in bracing pseudo-realist hokum. The film sends itself up and doesn’t ask to taken seriously. As The Invite does, lamentably.
The Indian food lasts a second night. They’re small eaters now, even when including fruit and yoghurt, followed by a slice of ginger cake and a mug of tea. They enjoy another home-date, while watching Tom Cruise in Stephen Spielberg’s version of the HG Wells book The War of the Worlds. Terrifying, in a good way. The literary allusion elevates the hokum, using cinematic suspense devices later seen in the Jurassic Park films.
The date-nights work. They agree tv or film material is only worth watching if the characters are engaging and catch your attention.
Lessons are learned. Have more date nights, at the cinema and at home. Slow down. Use David Mamet’s father’s carpenter advice: measure twice, cut once.
Blood sugar and other medical matters settle before bed time, though, when he turns in, he grieves at this latest instance of his failing capacities. He’ll have to slow down. Again. Some more.
Recommendations?
The Invite? No. Humourless, self-pitying, disagreeable.
Safe? Yes. If you think you can stomach it. You know what you’re getting into – honest (?) hokum.
War of the Worlds? Enjoyable, slightly less honest hokum.
Saffron, Indian restaurant in Derry? Yes, definitely.
The Invite
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14173636/?ref_=fn_t_1
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