The Intern review

Clearly, Nancy Meyers, the filmmaker with an eye for laying out the unblemished life, has no idea of a) how start-ups work; b) how marriages function; c) how kindergarten schools operate; and d) that interns are just that — interns — doing the work no one else will, even if one day De Niro himself walked into the office.

When that happens in this film, the man who confesses “not to know what a USB connector is”, Ben Whittaker (De Niro), gets hired double-quick over others perhaps better qualified for an e-commerce firm. The company goes by the name ‘About The Fit’, and doesn’t seem to have anything to set it apart from other online clothes retailers except for its very, very attractive owner-founder in the form of Jules. Apart from her great clothes, hair, and flair for the job, she also cycles around the workplace. “To save time,” a staffer whispers into Ben’s ears. The cycle lasts all of two scenes, and we go on to spend the better part of the film in an Audi (brazenly advertised) with Jules feverishly typing away at a time into two iPhones and a tablet of some sort.

Ben, the silent observer, sizes up Jules in about 5 minutes. And, really, given what we have here, that is not surprising. “Stressed entrepreneur” with confused CEO issues, “slightly guilty wife and mother”, “an obsessive boss who sleeps little, eats little”, and who keeps drenching her hands in sanitiser. In any film that was actually interested in presenting the life of a successful working wife and mother, Ben would be judgmental, bringing his own old-world, father-of-a-son sensibilities into this equation, and Jules more expressive about exactly how torn she is.

Instead, Meyers, also the scriptwriter, has several plot contrivances thrown in that end up projecting Jules as a helpless woman needing just an older man’s guidance to tell her she is doing good. Meyers also has this confused idea about what the new man must be like. Clearly he has to be as immaculately dressed as Ben (“Why doesn’t anyone tuck anything in anymore?”), and yet the other role model, Jules’s devoted husband, is as “super cas (casual)” as they come at her office.

The only time The Intern shows some originality is when Ben leads three other staff members to break into Jules’s mother’s home — to delete a mail from her mother’s inbox that she sent unintentionally (Macs, again liberally advertised). They do it unquestioningly.

Surely, Hathaway was the choice for this role because of The Devil Wears Prada. But, really, can you imagine the devil in a high-street, off-a-website, discount-price rip-off?

Cast: Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Rene Russo, Anders Holm, JoJo Kushner
Directed: Nancy Meyers

Stars 1.5