What if you make a Woody Allen movie, but from the Annie Hall perspective, rather than the Alvy Singer one? This question was answered in one way with Nobody Wants This, the Netflix show about a non-Jewish woman dating a rabbi, and by the way, this woman? Not a Jew. Blonde, as well as gentile. There, the shiksappeal is the point.

The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s new movie, is a talking-and-squabbling-heavy, therapy-adjacent land of beautiful interiors and much-mined neuroses. One can infer that Seth Rogen’s Joe is the Jewish husband (he says schmuck, his jokes are self-deprecating, he is played by Seth Rogen in a Seth Rogen-ish manner) of a gentile wife (Angela, played by Wilde), but none of this is spelled out. Even if Angela was once some kind of goddess to Joe, ‘shiksa’ or otherwise, she is now the perimenopausal (this is spelled out) mother of their off-screen, spectre-ish 12-year-old.

The movie was co-written by Rashida Jones, a Jewish woman, and Will McCormack, who is, I am assuming, not a Jewish woman. Esther Perel, the Belgian-Jewish celebrity psychotherapist, consulted. Other than Rogen, none of the four people in the film are Jewish. (I remembered Norton from his 1998 turn as a neo-Nazi in American History X.) Would The Invite belong in a Jewish film festival? I don’t know, all I know is that I saw it and that’s a kind of Jewish film festival.

The sensibilities are Allen-ish, but also reminiscent of the one or two filmmakers who’ve come up since: Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale comes to mind, but now that I think of it, so does Edward Albee’s 1962 (so, pre-Allen) play and the 1966 film version, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (I thought of this connection independently, just given that it’s about a couple hosting and arguing, but, as is not surprising, Wilde herself had as well.) It’s most directly based on Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish movie, The People Upstairs. There’s also some common ground with 2024’s technically-Jewish hit memoir More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage, in that the sex alluded to is racy, but the proceedings themselves are grim, and the work itself is if anything anti-erotic.

Is squabbling itself Jewish-coded? Or is this one of these things where it might seem that way to you, if you happen to be Jewish, but it’s like saying, in my culture, we appreciate food, i.e. an assertion that merely reveals your ignorance about human universals. As I’m about to explain, this is more hate-filled arguing than witty repartee.

On Nobody Wants This, Rogen, one of Canadian Jewry’s biggest celebrities, is a hip rabbi in Los Angeles. In The Invite, he’s further north in California: a San........

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