I mean no offense when I say my mother would love The Intern. She’s of a certain older age and prefers, well, nice movies—i.e. movies without sex and/or violence—and The Intern is a nice movie. Perhaps the nicest one star Anne Hathaway has made since she did those Princess Diaries flicks roughly a decade ago, and probably the nicest one co-star Robert De Niro has made, well, ever. I myself must be getting older, because I liked The Intern.
De Niro plays Ben Whitaker, widower and retired phone-directory executive who, finding retired life boring, applies to a senior-citizen internship program at a fast-growing online clothing company founded and run by Hathaway. His wisdom and likability quickly win over the employees there, though an initially skeptical Hathaway takes longer to come ‘round. When she inevitably does, De Niro becomes a valuable mentor of sorts to her, in both her professional and personal lives.
It should come as no surprise that The Intern is a nice movie, as it was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, she who co-wrote the Father of the Bride remakes back in the ‘90s—two of the nicest modern movies ever to exist (I loved ‘em both)—and wrote and directed other nice efforts like The Parent Trap remake, Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday and It’s Complicated. She’s aware of her nice-flick niche and is sticking to it.
As such the movie doesn’t stray too far from the Meyers formula, in that it features a mostly all-white cast playing characters that are extremely well off—De Niro owns any number of nice suits and ties—and the conflict that occurs feels slight and gets resolved in easy, sitcom-like fashion. It may make relating to the characters a little harder, but it’s not a crime, and the characters are played to very amiable effect by De Niro and Hathaway.
De Niro, in particular, is probably the most genial I’ve ever seen him in a movie—except maybe for that doctor he played in Marvin’s Room—and it’s refreshing to see him do a simple nice-person role, one unadorned with any eccentricities. De Niro makes him an interesting person all on his own (even if he does seem too good to be true in his wisdom-giving). Hathaway, meanwhile, is the nicest stressed-out boss you’ll ever meet. Even when she’s initially dismissive of De Niro, you still like her.
Myers could have easily reduced the film’s two-hour runtime by trimming De Niro and Hathaway’s hotel-room talk, and eliminated De Niro and his millennial cohorts breaking into a house. But she at least gets some good use out of those millennials, including Workaholics co-stars Adam DeVine as a De Niro co-worker and Anders Holm as Hathaway’s husband. And as De Niro’s love interest, Meyers casts the (relatively) age-appropriate Rene Russo, whose presence is never a bad thing. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]
Comedy
Rated PG-13
DVD Release Date: 1/19/16
