THE INTERN – The Review

There’s a terrific performance by Robert DeNiro at the center of Nancy Meyer’s agreeably shallow office comedy THE INTERN in which he plays Ben Whittaker, a 70-year-old retired widower. It’s a sweet, melancholy turn that shows a kindhearted side to the actor that we rarely see. Too bad the rest of THE INTERN lacks the depth of DeNiro’s portrayal, but it’s still a breezy crowd-pleaser that goes down easy enough.

DeNiro’s costar in THE INTERN is Ann Hathaway as Jules Ostin, the owner of About The Fit, a NYC-based online fashion website so successful it employs 220 people and an office masseuse. She’s a workaholic who barely has time for her young daughter and stay-home-dad husband Matt (Anders Holm). DeNiro’s Ben is looking for something to do besides attend funerals and avoid the advances of his horny friend Patty (Linda Lavin). He decides to head back to the work force, this time as an unpaid intern at About The Fit and soon finds himself Jules’ personal assistant. Ben’s old-school wisdom makes him at first useful and then essential (turns out he spent his career working on the same building!). He spots Jules’ driver taking a slug from a wino bag, so becomes her personal chauffer, getting to know her family when he picks her up in the morning. He cheers her up when she’s down and encourages her to run her company the way she wants. The mutual respect that develops between the unlikely pair is predictable but convincing and sometimes moving. A comic sequence involving Ben taking his younger office mates to break in into Jules’ mother’s home to delete a nasty email she’d inadvertently sent seems from a broader comedy, but it gets a lot of laughs and there’s a nicely written sequence in a bar where Jules drunkenly compares the goofy hipsters from her office to the real man that she’s discovered in Ben.

THE INTERN is pat and predictable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable, which it is. Meyers’s previous films (IT’S COMPLICATED, SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE, THE HOLIDAY) have bored me because of scripts that rarely rise above the level of a television sitcom, but DeNiro and Hathaway have a nice chemistry which lifts THE INTERN and I think it’s Meyer’s best film. If Hathaway’s Jules drives the narrative, then DeNiro is the movie’s soul. He is especially good in this sincere and wholesome role and he clearly has fun in scenes where he dresses down his younger male co-workers. Less successful is Hathaway. We know that Jules is a tough, savvy, type-A, take-charge, glass-ceiling-buster because we’re told so many times, but it’s not what we’re shown. Hathaway is adorable  and gorgeous but Jules is too soft and folds too early and easily. Starting her out more bitchy and egomaniacal may have added more drama to her character’s arc. She should have paid more attention to Meryl Streep when they were making THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA together. The few scenes in which DeNiro is absent focus on the relationship between Jules and her husband, complete with a third-act conflict involving infidelity. These scenes are the film’s weakest, not helped that charisma-challenged Anders Holm, with distracting facial hair, is a weak link as Matt. He drags Hathaway down with him especially in a reconciliation scene near the end that is remarkable in how poorly acted it is. Renee Russo is a sexy presence as Fiona, the aforementioned office masseuse and love interest for Ben, but it’s an underwritten and thankless role. She shows up in just three or four brief scenes, the first two featuring cheap visual gags about erections and oral sex. Linda Lavin as Patty is barely in the film in a role that seems trimmed while poor Mary Kay Place, listed in the credits as Jules’ mom, is never seen (we only hear her voice).

THE INTERN is well-directed by Meyer who keeps its 122 minutes whizzing along nicely and is aided by Theodore Shapiro’s catchy score. It’s all cookie-cutter warm and fuzzy, hard not to like, and while THE INTERN is not a great film, it is a good one and I do recommend it.

4 of 5 Stars