Issue #97: Special Guests 🍒

It’s been a while and also a long week—let’s catch up later and get right to it.

This week we’ve got Zosha on the mature pleasures of The Invite and Cate on the referential reverence of Meredith Alloway’s Forbidden Fruits.

It’s never a great idea to match your house too much. Everyone’s got their own taste and their own style, but personally I hate the feeling of realizing the new phone case I bought happens to match the color of the bike I got a few months ago and also the wall in my living room. I contain multitudes, and blending too much seems dangerous. 

So I definitely noticed when Angela (Olivia Wilde) changes into a pale green shirt that almost exactly matches the walls of the home she’s been renovating. She does so in a fit—she’s in the midst of trying to get her husband Joe (Seth Rogen) on board with the fact that their enigmatic upstairs neighbors are coming over for dinner; he’s pushing back because he’s tired and blindsided, and she’s telling him it’s already too late and the souffle is in the oven and she told him last night. Their fight very quickly spirals into noise complaints, back aches, podcasts, new decorations, compliments, barbs, and cheese. Then the doorbell rings. 

This is how The Invite welcomes us to a dinner party from hell. As Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penélope Cruz) enter, the battlelines are drawn and the stage is set. All that needs to happen now is for everything to run its course. 

What I appreciate so much about the claustrophobic world of The Invite is the scalpel-precision it approaches its wind-up with—that muted jade of the apartment threatening to swallow Angela, or the quiet unease Pína can’t help but cock her head at. And what I love even more is how natural it feels when those things go unanswered. As the two couples square off, pair off, stare down, and talk up each other in different arrangements, The Invite lets minor comments bubble to the surface as the night unfolds. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t. It feels adult in that way; it helps imbue the movie with a sense of real lives being lived, real resentments floating around in the air until someone puffs up their chest enough and breathes it in. 

The film’s got a great ensemble for it: Wilde is a bundle of energy, at once desperate for acknowledgement and wilting from it. Rogen’s performance is a flex within his wheelhouse, a confident display of how much he’s grown as an actor that’s able to mature without stretching. For my money it’s Norton and Cruz who feel irreplaceable in the story. Their dynamic is ever-cool, an earnestly lived assurance and passion that allows for everything from little asides between themselves to big explanations. Their characters control the hairpins of the movie, letting it glide wherever the evening needs to go, and both of them anchor what could be jockey transitions. 

Wilde, who’s also the director, isn’t the best of the ensemble, but as director of the whole endeavor she remarkably brings Rashida Jones and Will McCormick’s script to life. Much will be said of the way she uses mirrors and windows—a way to see people, see part of them, see how they want to be seen, see what they can’t hide—to fragment fights and put people in the same shot. (Per the Q&A with Jones and McCormick after my WGA screening: they thought a lot about windows in a home, but the mirrors are all Wilde and the film’s cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra.) What I loved most about them is how they evolve: When Joe gets home their fight is all segmented through frames of mirrors and doorways. It’s tight closeups or people misaligned as they communicate from either side of a doorframe. They are in no way connecting on the same plane. As the night goes on, Wilde lets the camera go wide or tight depending on how she wants to follow the emotions of the scene. But gradually the frames slip away; there’s nothing left to block these people saying something true out loud. They can finally see each other—for better or worse. 

This is maybe all making the movie sound fussy and tightly controlled. It might be those things, but it’s also funny and feels far looser than its tonal pivots feel like they ought to. The Invite is like cracking an achy joint, with stiltedness loudly giving way to relief. Life so often has the potential for either. Awkwardness is the end of the world until it’s a great joke; an indiscretion between partners, an embarrassment and a chance to share a smile. The Invite delicately dances between those poles as it spirals towards its conclusion. It does so with a smirk, a wink, and an adult sensibility, bless its heart.

If you took the quips of Mean Girls, the coven of The Craft, and added the sardonic wit of Jennifer’s Body, you might get something resembling Forbidden Fruits. Starring Lili Reinhart and directed by Meredith Alloway, the wickedly witchy film is hyper-aware of the ones that have come before it, and finds a way to honor them all while still creating something all its own. 

Mean Girls is the loose, basic frame the movie uses to construct its narrative. Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) sit atop the social food chain of the local mall as the hot girls du jure — purveyors of the upscale fashion boutique Free Eden. When newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) is hired alongside them, their cultish, codependent threesome becomes an explosive foursome. 

There is so much to like about this movie, not least of which is Reinhart’s performance. Stone-faced and sarcastic, she shapes Apple into a murderous Queen Bee. She rules their coven, Paradise, with an iron fist, converting the store into her own private fiefdom. The girls steal from the store and overcharge customers to make up the difference. They subscribe to shine theory, only text boys with emojis, and confess their sins to a girlboss version of “femme martyr” Marilyn Monroe. 

Here, Apple’s “Plastics” are Fruits, eagerly waiting to do her bidding. But when they start to self-actualize, she falls apart. She’s a very direct descendant of Regina George, but with more bite, more fury, and more naked manipulation. Reinhart is absolutely fantastic in the role. And it’s well past time we added another iconic female villain to the canon. 

Pedretti also does her best Gretchen Weiners as Cherry — a deeply lonely alcoholic orphan desperate to be Apple’s one and only best friend. While her affected pseudo-baby voice can grate at points, it effectively conveys Cherry’s lack of sincere interiority. She craves Apple’s attention and affection, because she has no one and nothing else. 

Fig meanwhile combines both Mean Girls’s Karen Smith and The Craft’s Rochelle. The group’s only Black member, she’s largely dismissed as ornamental. But her ditzy affect is eventually revealed to be a performance created to fit in. Her feeble resistance clicks into focus. She’s only working at the store to save up for her Master’s degree. Going along is easier than standing out. 

Once Pumpkin joins their group, the rest of the movie takes on an indulgent funhouse quality. It’s a warped version of the Mean Girls we know and love. Iconic lines are quoted, subverted and bastardized. (“On Wednesdays I have therapy.”) Fig hides a boyfriend, Cherry keeps Apple’s secrets, and Pumpkin tries to destroy the group from within. There’s even a burn book of sorts, only this time it’s a planner that acts as a de facto means of surveillance. 

But while it may mimic that movie’s broad strokes, what makes Forbidden Fruits work is its style. While it bites heavily from The Craft for its visuals and tonal sensibility — the film’s official poster recreates the iconic original — its closest spiritual ancestor is actually Heathers. I’d even go so far as to say that it more closely apes Paramount’s short-lived television reboot series. It’s a “Woke 1.0” take on the way our culture seized on language meant to name harm, and used it to inflict harm instead. Apple responds to minor irritations with condescension and wicked words (“Do you literally hate women?”), forcing the other girls to tiptoe around her rapidly expanding ego. Her dryness and impatience make her a villain you want to root for. Her cuntiness is a feature, not a bug. And as the group descends into paranoia and chaos, Pumpkin is the one to stoke the flames, arguably more successful than Cady Heron ever was. 

Unfortunately, the film’s biggest hurdle is Tung’s performance. As the protagonist, her story drives the plot, but Tung never quite rises to the occasion. The effort is there, but that’s part of the problem. Her choices are effortful, closer to a mustache-twirling villain than an interloper with a secret. It hampers the movie’s otherwise successful attempts to recreate the sly, campy tone of its predecessors. When Pumpkin’s secret is finally revealed, the moment begs for an epic face-off between calculated equals. Instead, Reinhart runs away with the scene. It’s a delight to watch her, but one does wish she had a better scene partner. 

Forbidden Fruits is slick, campy, cunty and fun. Though the story is small — and truthfully the plot gets a tiny bit muddled in the middle — it’s an extremely satisfying watch. In a lot of ways it feels like a return to the kinds of movies that trusted its audience to understand the cultural landscape they existed in. And unfortunately that’s increasingly rare.

The whimsy and heartbreak of America’s garage sales. Propublica’s report on Alice Sebold and the mishandling of her rape case. I’m not over the moon for it but you should let The Vampire Lestat finish before you boo. The limits of Spielbergian humanism.

And more writing from us: Zosha on having No Other Choice. Cate profiled Tracee Ellis Ross for Porter Magazine! Cate returned to to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast to discuss the ambitious little queer horror film Leviticus. Zosha wrote about listening for a hero in (Emmy nominated) A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Cate chatted with Rotten Tomatoes about the career of the one most iconic, Nicolas Cage.

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Zosha + Cate <3