‘Overnight’ explores fidelity, doubt

Alex has an inferiority complex. His appendage is considerably smaller than average, and at a key, comically awkward moment in “The Overnight,” this recent L.A. arrival (he’s a Seattle transplant, with a wife and child) gets a look at what his new friend Kurt has to offer. In a couple of shots the actors who play these two – Adam Scott, sporting a goatee that tries too hard, and Jason Schwartzman, alternately gregarious and wormy – flourish prosthetic genitalia. Clearly, considerable time went into finding just the right fakes both for plausibility’s sake as well as for comedy’s.

Writer-director Patrick Brice’s second feature, following his found-footage thriller “Creep,” works fairly well as a “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” for a new era in edgy-yet-genial commercial sensibilities.

Most of it takes place in a spacious house on the east side of L.A. Bookending the film are scenes unfolding in a public park, where stay-at-home Alex (Scott), his working wife Emily (Taylor Schilling) and their son RJ (RJ Hermes) are taking part in a birthday party of a kid they barely know. They’ve been in L.A. for two weeks and haven’t yet made friends.

Then, along comes an evident bohemian sporting a hipster hat on steroids, bordering on the one Daniel Day-Lewis wore in “There Will Be Blood.” He is Kurt (Schwartzman), at the park with his son. They invite the newbies over for pizza and drinks, to be joined by Kurt’s French wife, Charlotte (Judith Godreche). From there “The Overnight” explores, briskly, the topics of monogamy, fidelity, marital boredom and Alex’s persistent self-doubt regarding his sexual capabilities.

That’s more than enough for a movie. The Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, executive-produced “The Overnight” and as with much of their work, along with that of directors Lynn Shelton (“Humpday”) and Joe Swanberg (“Drinking Buddies”), a quizzical air of transgression, its risks and rewards, hovers over the scenario.

“Only in America do we let children dictate when the night is over!” a cajoling Charlotte says to her guests when they make noises about it being late already. Before long we learn what’s really on the minds of Kurt and Charlotte. The low-level tension in “The Overnight” depends on how the squares respond.

I liked it up to a point – not a specific story point, but to a certain degree throughout. It’s pretty thin, and I didn’t buy what screenwriter Brice imagined as Charlotte’s preferred 10-year-itch antidote. (It involves a stealth visit to a massage parlor.) Someday one of these domestic-panic indies will figure out a way to make the female characters as vital as the males. This one’s easy to watch, and the four key players are all drolly in sync and slightly better than their material.