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| Directed and Written by Nancy Meyers |
Alo Party Peoples.
"Here's a really great pitch for a comedy; take an old school straight laced 20th Century businessman, and stick him in a decidedly 21st Century Internet startup. It feels topical, it gets work for a veteran actor, it's a setup for jokes about how 'quirky' and kinda childish Millennials are..."
That's how I imagine the pitch for The Intern went. Its director, Nancy Meyers, is primarily a maker of family comedies and rom-coms, and The Intern feels somewhere between the two. It's the kind of movie where Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway share a touching scene together, followed immediately by a plan to break into her mother's house and steal her computer to delete an email. It's a strange combination, but through combination of good actors and a good director, The Intern becomes a charming little date movie.
Robert De Niro is Ben Whittaker, a widowed retired businessman that feels discontent with his quiet retirement. One day he sees a flyer for a senior intern program at an e-commerce startup and signs up. There he becomes the intern of Anne Hathaway as 20-something CEO Jules Ostin, who took a custom clothing sales site from not existing to over 200 employees and billions in less than 9 months. At first she's irritated since she didn't even know about the senior internship program, but as they get to know each other they grow closer, and...
No, it doesn't go there; this is a mainstream comedy coming out in September, it's not going to make a 72 year old man and a 32 year old woman an onscreen couple. Instead, The Intern is focused on solid character work from its two leads. Hathaway plays a manic hyper-focused professional, the kind of person that sleeps five hours a night, never works on only one thing at at time, and personally tracks individual transactions on her site in real time, and she is excellent at it. De Niro is also pretty great, playing against type as a jovial grandfatherly figure that serves as a perfect contrast to Hathaway, though it would have been great to see him go the extra mile and put some real passion into his performance.
Pretty much every part of The Intern is like that, it's very proficient, but there isn't much passion to it. Nancy Meyers is good at doing visual comedy without shoving it in the audience's face and going "Look at this! Isn't this impressive!?", and there are a couple of real zingers in there, but besides one strangely out of place gag involving an on site masseuse accidentally groping Ben, it never gets truly outrageous. There's a recurring theme of generational dissonance running throughout the film, from the cinematography emphasizing how out of place Ben's suit is among the totally casual attire of the other interns, to Julie's startup being based in what was once the factory that Ben worked at, to the fact that that factory printed phone books; a product that once served a vital purpose, but is totally obsolete in the Digital Age that made Julie's company possible, but the film never really addresses this theme outright, and it gets consigned to the details.
But review the movie you have, not the movie you want. The Intern is not - and it is not trying to be - a treatise on the Amazon era of corporate America. It wants to be a sweet little movie backed by good recognizable actors meant to send married couples on their night out home with a smile on their face and warm feelings in their hearts, and on that level it succeeds with flying colors.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 3/5
No, it doesn't go there; this is a mainstream comedy coming out in September, it's not going to make a 72 year old man and a 32 year old woman an onscreen couple. Instead, The Intern is focused on solid character work from its two leads. Hathaway plays a manic hyper-focused professional, the kind of person that sleeps five hours a night, never works on only one thing at at time, and personally tracks individual transactions on her site in real time, and she is excellent at it. De Niro is also pretty great, playing against type as a jovial grandfatherly figure that serves as a perfect contrast to Hathaway, though it would have been great to see him go the extra mile and put some real passion into his performance.
Pretty much every part of The Intern is like that, it's very proficient, but there isn't much passion to it. Nancy Meyers is good at doing visual comedy without shoving it in the audience's face and going "Look at this! Isn't this impressive!?", and there are a couple of real zingers in there, but besides one strangely out of place gag involving an on site masseuse accidentally groping Ben, it never gets truly outrageous. There's a recurring theme of generational dissonance running throughout the film, from the cinematography emphasizing how out of place Ben's suit is among the totally casual attire of the other interns, to Julie's startup being based in what was once the factory that Ben worked at, to the fact that that factory printed phone books; a product that once served a vital purpose, but is totally obsolete in the Digital Age that made Julie's company possible, but the film never really addresses this theme outright, and it gets consigned to the details.
But review the movie you have, not the movie you want. The Intern is not - and it is not trying to be - a treatise on the Amazon era of corporate America. It wants to be a sweet little movie backed by good recognizable actors meant to send married couples on their night out home with a smile on their face and warm feelings in their hearts, and on that level it succeeds with flying colors.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 3/5
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