Robert De Niro is the last person you’d think to cast in a remake of Amélie, but if Nancy Meyers’s love letter to workaholism is good for anything, it’s seeing the star of Taxi Driver and Mean Streets as a fastidious fixer of other people’s problems. Despite a dopey elevator pitch and some truly wretched screenwriting, The Intern still manages to be the most interesting thing De Niro has done in quite some time. If you don’t get permanent ocular damage from continuously rolling your eyes during the first 90 minutes, the final half-hour will remind you why he was once considered a great actor.
We meet Ben Whittaker, a 70-year-old retired widower in Brooklyn, via a video cover letter. Battling boredom, he’s applying as a senior (as in senior citizen) intern for a local internet startup, an online clothing shop created by Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway) that has turned into a manic, overnight success. While Ostin is the type of boss that has a hand in every aspect of the business – and zanily rides her bicycle from the customer-service phone banks across the open-plan office to a designer’s meeting – she has no recollection of approving this new outreach program. Her chipper but worried lieutenant Cameron (Andrew Rannells, as the smiling physical embodiment of exposition) pushes for the unlikely idea. Everyone at the company is so young; maybe some experience would do them some good.
Experience is oozing out of Whittaker’s pores. He worked for 40 years designing phone books, and, while they may not be in demand any more, the man knows business. After a lengthy stint of merely smiling and staying out of everyone’s way, he soon gets the ear of the boss, and benignly starts guiding her toward more confident decision-making, both at work and at home.
Meyers and Hathaway tackle a tough subject: young mothers with demanding jobs. Ostin is a caring, intelligent woman whose only real foe is the human need to waste a few hours each night on sleep. Her stay-at-home husband Matt (Anders Holm) seems, at first, to be the perfect partner for this set-up. But to quote Meyers’s earlier picture, something’s gotta give. These frustrations eventually come pouring out in an emotional third act that is tender and relatable. The problem is getting there.
The bulk of The Intern is a morass of wackiness, a chain of sequences shot in a flat and predictable manner that range from tedious to idiotic. There’s a moment when one character mistakenly thinks they’ve walked in on a sex act, a gag that was tired when Three’s Company repeated it each week. There’s another bit where everyone suddenly becomes a cat burglar. Meyers cribs from a source worse than sitcoms: her pacing is more like reality television, and composer Theodore Shapiro enhances this with awful transition cues like cymbal rolls, making everything feel like a cheap trailer for a movie you may one day actually see.
Weirder still is Meyers’s lust for the corporate world. Again, it’s hard to frown too much on a film about the struggles of working women, and Hathaway gives a strong performance, but take a step back and there’s the realisation that all this sturm und drang isn’t for a surgeon, but a gal hawking schmattes. De Niro’s Whittaker applied for this job because he was bored in retirement. He couldn’t maybe have done some charitable volunteer work? Later, he positions himself as the linchpin of the organisation, but at no point does anyone offer him a paying job. (It’s OK, though: in Meyers’s New York, everyone drives their SUV home to their enormous brownstone.)
If the scenario for The Intern sounds awful, that’s because it is. And it isn’t as if Meyers writes dialogue like Oscar Wilde. Still, Hathaway and De Niro have some real chemistry, and by the end of the picture, they have developed something you rarely see represented in films: a male-female friendship that isn’t familial or sexual. And for that, this internship deserves a little bit of credit.
• The Intern is released in the US on 25 September and in the UK on 2 October
