Olivia Wilde’s career as a director reached an uncomfortable apex with the 2022 release of Don’t Worry Darling. Here was a starry, ambitious, high-profile release featuring Florence Pugh, singing sensation Harry Styles, and Chris Pine, among other stars, which technically speaking made much more at the box office than her previous effort, the critically acclaimed comedy Booksmart. Given all that, Darling should have been the precise opposite of a sophomore slump — if not for the endless swirl of gossip that surrounded the production, centered largely (though not exclusively) on her relationship with Styles that apparently developed on-set.
Cue rumors of marital and/or cast discord (particularly between Wilde and Pugh, though Wilde has recently denied reports of a screaming match). The movie itself dropped pretty hard following a strong opening weekend. That combination of ultimately disappointing box office and middling reviews furthered its reputation as a misguided near-boondoggle from a filmmaker who had spun out of control without ever making a major hit. Having largely ditched her acting career in favor of directing — most of her 2020s acting gigs have been cameos, as well as a supporting role in her down Darling — Wilde was suddenly neither here nor there: Not exactly a movie star, yet not fully reborn as an A-list filmmaker, either.
Now she’s back with an unexpectedly high-profile summer, with a further curveball. Her two new movies throw back to her early-career years as a sex symbol.
Angela, her character in The Invite, would likely quibble with that distinction. She’s a married stay-at-home mom in San Francisco, and now that her kid demands far less of her time, she fills her days with an interest in interior decoration. Not as a career, mind you, but in her own apartment, which her husband Joe (Seth Rogen) has inherited from his parents. This, combined with his teaching job following a brush with alt-rock radio success in his youth, contributes to Joe’s general feeling of disappointment and self-loathing, despite the fact that he is married to someone who looks like Olivia Wilde. In turn, Joe’s malaise seems to have convinced Angela that she’s something of a mess. And emotionally, she kind of is, trying to find salvation in self-improvement podcasts, the approval of others, and her own good taste.
The movie begins with Joe arriving home to Angela’s news that she has invited neighboring couple Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penélope Cruz) over for the evening (though she swears up and down that this is not actually news, but long-discussed and previously confirmed plans). He hems and haws, they argue —much of the movie plays out like mid-period Woody Allen, with an eye towards fractured marriages even as the male lead issues his one-liners and exasperated reactions — and they finally commence an evening that oscillates between intimacy and discomfort, sometimes in a split second. Joe is dying to bring up the fact that Hawk and Pina’s noisy lovemaking is audible in the other couple’s apartment; Angela is mortified that he’d even consider it. Hawk and Pina, for their part, may have reasons for pushing through Joe’s obvious hostility and lingering in their neighbors’ living room.
Wilde also directed The Invite, and supposedly didn’t plan on co-starring in it — only those four characters appear on screen — until some casting reshuffles brought her into the mix. The multitasking must not have ultimately fazed her. The movie contains two of her most accomplished performances, in front of and behind the camera. As Angela, she updates a character type who might have been played, in other eras, by Diane Keaton or Debra Winger, riding a line between lovable and insufferable. Angela is beautiful, stylish, and, we eventually learn, pretty horny, but her self-image is a disaster. She can’t stop imagining how she looks to others, which really means she can’t stop looking at herself through her own darting eyes.
It’s fertile material for an actress whose early film career was so often framed by the male gaze. She was retro-futuristic for movies like In Time and Tron: Legacy, while in the summer of 2011, multiple releases (The Change-Up and Cowboys & Aliens) were sold in part on the promise of her scantily clad appearance, her body becoming a key part of various trailers. More honest advertising would have been upfront about what they were saying: And during any perceived lulls, you might get to see Olivia Wilde’s butt!
When movies like this fail, stars like Ryan Reynolds or Daniel Craig rarely have quite so much scoring more A-level parts. The Girl, however, takes on an aura of failure, a kind of implicit loserdom that assumes she was begging for these parts (and that anyone else could have played them). Don’t Worry Darling’s Twilight Zone-y story is explicitly about that feeling of commodification, albeit in a clumsy way that may have felt like too little, too late, and, yeah, maybe a little too silly in 2022.
If anything, Angela in The Invite seems to feel something like nostalgic for her presumed hot-girl youth; the movie quite pointedly doesn’t get into broader gender politics so much as the dynamics of marriage and desire. Sometimes the movie feels like it’s skirting the surface of this stuff, using (verbal) explicitness as a kind of Judd Apatow-like punchline rather than a genuine exploration of sexuality. The movie certainly has currents of sexiness, and in some ways goes further than audiences might expect after nearly two decades of raunchy talk with little action (especially with Rogen, a major figure in post-Apatow comedy, on hand — and also giving a strong performance here). Yet to some extent it’s using sexual transgression as a lure for a familiar dramedy of marital disappointment. In that area, it’s nuanced and, at times, surprisingly sophisticated, particularly with how Wilde shoots her limited location (much of the movie unfolds in a single apartment) using a window-heavy, voyeurism-adjacent visual motif. But the film seems a little reluctant to strip further down, literally and figuratively.
That’s not a problem with I Want Your Sex, the other movie Wilde has out this summer. Here she only stars, and plays imposing, sexually voracious artist Erika Kane largely through the eyes of her workplace and later sexual subordinate Elliot (Cooper Hoffman). Gregg Araki’s sex comedy has the merest pinch of pseudo-noir mystery at its outset. Mostly it’s about a horny, but relatively vanilla, young guy unlocking some kinks and possibly, accidentally catching feelings. It’s fun, thin stuff that feels less edgy than Araki’s earlier work and less energized than later-period comedies like Kaboom, but Wilde is a riot.
While The Invite’s Angela is a symphony of twitchy nerves, Erika Kane is all no-nonsense, deadpan domination; making her a cynical artist constantly wielding her sexuality throws Wilde’s sex-symbol past and serious-artist aspirations through an inverted roller coaster. She’s not a big enough start to be fully engaging in self-parody, but even years after her big-yet-embarrassing 2011, there’s something resonant about Wilde playing a character who’s proud of her sexual abilities while practically rolling her eyes at the “provocative” art she has to produce to stay afloat.
I Want Your Sex, which will reach theaters in July not long after The Invite expands to more cities, is a little flimsy on its own, but it’s a fine complement to The Invite’s push-pull between well-practiced repression and frantic desire. In her 40s, Wilde seems more in tune with her gifts as a performer than ever before, managing to shed the obligatory and sometimes insulting roles as The Girl without denying her sexuality. It’s similar to how she rearranged the optics of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Drinking Buddies, an unusually wistful romantic comedy that took place right on the cusp of when carefree youthful carousing becomes problem drinking.
Don’t Worry Darling may have felt like a shallow entry in the cinema of #MeToo; maybe part of what it was missing was more of Wilde herself. With The Invite and I Want Your Sex, she reclaims her on-camera power.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. In addition to contributing at Decider, his work also appears regularly at The A.V. Club, The Guardian, and GQ, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.