The Intern (2015)
Directed by Nancy Meyers
70-year-old widower Ben Whittaker has discovered that retirement isn't all it's cracked up to be. Seizing an opportunity to get back in the game, he becomes a senior intern at an online fashion site, founded and run by Jules Ostin.
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At one point De Niro gets emotional watching Gene Kelly sing "You Were Meant for Me" to Debbie Reynolds in "Singin' in the Rain," a nod to both the classical Hollywood that Meyers looks to update and more straightforward notions of romance.
The closest these two get to a bed is sitting on one while watching Gene Kelly croon “You Were Meant For Me” to Debbie Reynolds in a Netflix screening of Singin’ in the Rain.
At the end of their talk, as Jules drifts off to sleep, Ben watches misty-eyed as the TV plays that wonderful scene from Singin' in the Rain where Gene Kelly sings " You Were Meant for Me " to a glowing Debbie Reynolds.
He turns to mush watching Singin' in the Rain, and he hits it off with the company's in-house masseuse, Fiona (Rene Russo).
(The idea is reminiscent of a subplot in the nearly-forgotten 1995 dramedy “Bye Bye Love” that featured Ed Flanders.)
But a silly set piece in which Ben enlists some of the younger goofballs of About The Fit on a housebreaking mission, replete with latter-day “Ocean’s Eleven” references, is actually a tolerable bit of rompage.
For some reason, Meyers stages a wacky Ocean’s Eleven -style heist at one point, and too many of the jokes are sitcom-cutesy rather than being actually funny.
An overlong vignette involving a break-in is hopelessly contrived (though it does allow for some amusing chitchat regarding Ocean's Eleven), while a couple of out-of-left-field bits involving Ben's erection are sophomoric and completely out of place.
Instead Ben makes an about-face and plots a campy, “Ocean’s Eleven”-style plot to break into her mom’s home and delete the email before she returns.
The Intern doesn’t have the sophistication or wit of an About Schmidt , but it shares with that Alexander Payne comedy-drama an unspoken acknowledgement that its senior-citizen character has more years behind him than ahead, a realization that subtly colors everything Ben does in the film.
Surely, it’s a movie like “About Schmidt” about a senior citizen looking for a life after his marriage, but the movie is less about the meaningless of life, and more about how character Ben doesn’t have it so bad.
The anti-About Schmidt, The Intern is the boomer daydream of a 66-year-old filmmaker, which definitely feels out of step with the times but maybe not as much as the movie's gender imbalances (this thing is a sausage-fest) and hopeless whiteness.
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Hathaway’s take on the underwritten Jules is refreshingly unshowy, but De Niro seems a little lost; his Ben is muted to the point of evanescence, and a moment where he talks to himself in the mirror—he’s been told that Jules distrusts anyone who doesn’t blink—feels like a bizarro-world echo of his iconic Taxi Driver scene.
It’s been almost 40 years since Robert De Niro played Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” and here he is again, in “The Intern,” contemplating his reflection in a mirror.
Speed test: Does the thought of a wandering Robert De Niro looking in the mirror and practicing office greetings in the style of Taxi Driver make you blanch?
As an actor, it is surreal to see De Niro staring into a mirror, aping his iconic “You talking to me?” face-off from almost 40 years ago in “Taxi Driver.”
(The film even has a call-out to the “You talkin’ to me?” scene in Taxi Driver, except instead of taunting the mirror, he’s adorably practicing his facial expressions to impress Jules.
It's astonishing to watch De Niro — who has been great in great movies, like The Godfather: Part II and Taxi Driver, and sometimes just as good or even better in imperfect ones like New York, New York — and realize that he's just as capable as any other actor of slouching through a film like a lump of mold making its way down a tree limb.
The Intern (not to be confused with the similarly themed 2013 Owen Wilson–Vince Vaughn vehicle, The Internship) casts Robert De Niro as Ben Whittaker, a gruff but lovable 70-year-old retiree left at loose ends after the death of his wife.
While not to be confused with “The Internship,” that crass Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson Google infomercial from 2013, “The Intern” similarly relies on the talents of its two leads.
Though there are plenty of gags about the elderly and technology, and sex and fashion, the overall attitude to Ben is one of politically correct respect, unlike Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's experience in The Internship.
The subtly raised issues update some of the themes raised by Meyers (who started out as a writer) in her script for 1987 Diane Keaton hit Baby Boom .
A longtime exception to the man's-world rule is filmmaker Nancy Meyers, who wrote and produced such woman-centered films as "Private Benjamin" (1980, with Goldie Hawn) and "Baby Boom" (1987, with Diane Keaton) before affirming her auteur status by becoming a director in 1998 with the remake of "The Parent Trap," starring a pre-delinquency Lindsay Lohan.
The 1987 film "Baby Boom," co-written by Meyers with then-husband Charles Shyer, was explicitly concerned with the notion of "having it all," whether a woman could have a family and a career.
This film bears a resemblance to Baby Boom, a 1987 film co-written by Meyers and her former partner, Charles Shyer.
With a lot of the movies she’s written (Private Benjamin, Baby Boom) or writes and directs, she’s thinking about the cost of having a career.
Few filmmakers can do contemporary comedy -- whatever the era -- like Meyers, whose credits include "Baby Boom" and "Something's Gotta Give."
It takes a premise that might have served for a nicely nasty age-reversal “All About Eve” and uses it for a white-bread fairy-tale that could serve as the pilot for a network sitcom.
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A cross between Mary Poppins and The Devil Wears Prada, the film is another crowd-pleaser — albeit one with the knotty subtext that women seeking harmony at home and office need a father figure to light the path.
Put him in a nightshirt and he’d be Clarence the angel from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”