What Are the Millennial Movie Masterpieces?
Olivia Wilde’s ‘The Invite’ is a timeless examination of long-term relationships. It’s also a generational text. Are there any other films by and for Millennials that nail them quite so well?
Welcome back to Projections, the home base for movie lovers with bad backs and increasingly blurry vision.
I’m Canada-bound, headed north for The Big Picture’s first ever live show across the border. I expect to be greeted warmly and with the seriousness afforded a man of letters. (Read: podcast host.)
And with that in mind, I have been thinking about my generation’s place in the movies. Later this week, Olivia Wilde’s The Invite expands to theaters around the country, and with that will come a confrontation with Millennialism. What is that? Well, it’s a developing way of life embodied in the sociosexual anxieties, creature comforts, and vague air of discontent that animates the couple at the center of the movie, portrayed by notable Millennials 42-year-old Wilde and 44-year-old Seth Rogen.
By the time Martin Scorsese was 44 years old (the age I turn in less than three weeks), he’d directed 10 feature films, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. Steven Spielberg had made 15 by then, including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and three Indiana Jones films. Jane Campion had won her first of two Oscars by that age, as had Quentin Tarantino. The year he turned 44, John Ford made Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk. If it seems like an arbitrary cutoff for examination, I can’t argue with that, but it’s a time in which life itself seems to settle in. I’ve got a kid going to Kindergarten, a mortgage, a Bluray collection, and all the requisite joys and stressors that come with those things. But professionally speaking, I feel I have a real handle on who I am, what I want to do, and how to get there. It’s the first time in my life that I feel that way. You can see that confidence in the work of many film directors as well.
And even though it is a relatively modest and intimate chamber piece comedy, The Invite arrives at such a ripe moment, in which the cohort of creative people born between 1981 and 1996 are (finally) ascendant in cultural, political, and financial status. Ryan Coogler is a Millennial. Sam Altman is a Millennial. Zohran Mamdani is a Millennial. Wilde pays off this moment with her best work in front of and behind the camera—it’s easily one of my favorite films of the year so far, which I will discuss at length on The Big Picture later this week. Part of what makes it special—in addition to a buzzing script, a visual refinement that frames her actors in exasperated portraiture, and a sense of pace that mimics the manic-active mind of her character in particular—is its representation of so many local concerns.
Millennials are notably a step behind their forebears in terms of the benchmarks in life progress—home ownership, professional happiness, mental and physical balance. I haven’t seen these particular ideas communicated quite so lucidly and explicitly in a movie as The Invite. They’re bourgeois problems no doubt, but throughout film history, you can see them across generations—from the high-energy gender clashes of the 1940s screwball comedies to the sexual and social awakenings highlighted in New Hollywood farces like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Shampoo, The Graduate, and Carnal Knowledge. The meta-horndog comedies of the 2000s, from American Pie to The 40-Year-Old Virgin to The Hangover, prescribed a dick-first era of curdling masculinity for the first generation raised on D.A.R.E. and the AIDS crisis. (Judd Apatow turned 40 the year Knocked Up was released.) Movie comedies are uniquely good at showing us who we are at a given time in history. And the people making those movies are typically in the window that Millennials find themselves, roughly 35-45.
