After failing to fill the growing emptiness in his life following retirement, 70-year-old, widowed Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro) is hired as a personal intern to Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway), the CEO of her self-created online fashion start-up, in director and screenwriter Nancy Meyer’s latest movie, “The Intern.”
At the start of the film, Ben quickly grows in popularity with his younger coworkers due to his affable personality and hard-work ethic. The only person who is not immediately in favor of him working at the company is Jules. Nonetheless, she is soon won over by Ben’s charm and helpfulness and a budding friendship begins in which Ben helps her solve problems at work and in her personal life.
“The Intern” is a reliable, feel-good movie that captures the viewer’s interest and De Niro and Hathaway do an excellent job of building emotional connections between the audience and the characters throughout the 121 minutes. The film, however, is moderately comedic and leaves the viewer with mixed messages. On the surface, the plot is well-constructed, but lacks depth, and many loose ends remain untied as Meyers glosses over the struggle of balancing a career and family.
Furthermore, Ben’s chivalry extends far beyond the realm of possibility. He never misses a beat, never makes a mistake, and he even helps instruct the younger men at the office in the art of being a gentleman. Even when he and two other coworkers break into the house of Jules’ mother to delete an accidentally sent email, he remains portrayed as morally unblemished.
Jules seems to have it all, managing both her family and her career, but behind her near-perfect image, she struggles with keeping her home life together. Ultimately the film resolves her marital problems far too quickly and simply to be realistic and the difficulty in maintaining a strong mother-daughter relationship while having a full-time career is practically ignored.
In addition, the movie allocates almost all the comedy to three characters: Ben, and two coworkers Jason (Adam Devine), and Davis (Zack Pearlman), and contains quite a few cliches, such as Jules’ cold, unaffectionate mother and the patronizing stay-at-home moms at her daughter’s school who make condescending comments about Jules’ parenting. And, of course, an obvious stereotype is that because Jules is a successful business women, she must work in the fashion industry.
This intergenerational film is predominantly about friendship, a refreshing alternative to rom-coms, but does not withstand scrutiny and is quickly reduced to superficiality when one delves a little further into the messages of the film. Additionally, “The Intern” does not garner enough laughter to be considered a full-fledged comedy, but instead straddles flighty drama and sparse humor.
The film does bring up important questions about how society can combine traditional values with modern life. Meyers, however, explores this in such a superficial manner that it becomes ridiculous when Jules, inebriated, laments about what has happened to the male species, as if the fact that millennial men do not wear handkerchiefs is a tragic loss.
Despite the movie containing some feminist aspects, the contradiction that the self-sufficient career woman ends up relying on a man (even only as a friend) undoes the notion that Hathaway, a smart and savvy woman, can succeed independently.
Although the movie was quite enjoyable to watch and is overall well-done, Meyers seems to use the film as a platform to voice her opinions on the dying breed of gentlemen by making Jules her mouthpiece and using Ben as an unrealistic model of such a gentleman, leaving the charisma of the two main actors as one of the few factors holding up the film’s flimsy foundation.
Similar to the life of its female protagonist, the movie has a flawless facade, but behind it lie issues with the focus of the plot and the message the film conveys, but unlike Jules it does not have a guardian angel to rescue it.
