The Intern *** (2015, Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Rene Russo) – Movie Review

Robert De Niro plays 70-year-old retired widower Ben Whittaker. He’s a sweet, kind, thoughtful and indeed almost saintly individual. This gives De Niro quite a challenge. All the way through this spectacularly long comedy, I was waiting for, well, a slight character flaw for Ben to develop or be revealed, like he’s a real human being, or at least for old Ben to bring out a gun and kill someone. But no! Ben’s a sweet, kind, thoughtful and indeed almost saintly individual, unfortunately.

Anyhoo, Ben’s understandably bored with his nice dull, undemanding life as a retiree and catches a public advert notice that could get him back in the game. He applies for the role of, and is picked as, a senior intern at a hit online fashion site, founded and run by lovely businesswoman Jules Ostin.

Anne Hathaway plays Jules like she’s some younger, nicer relative of Meryl’s Streep’s character in her movie The Devil Wears Prada. Jules isn’t The Devil, unfortunately, she’s just too darned busy, distracted and disorganised, neglecting her nice-seeming home-parent hubby Matt (Anders Holm) and kid (JoJo Kushner) back home. She doesn’t even want Old Bob De Niro on her team. De Niro’s going to do something about all that, PDQ

Or maybe not quite PDQ as we’ve got a long movie on our hands and going to have to fill it with stuff, a world of stuff, actually. That stuff, unfortunately, is going to include a heist on Jules’s mom’s home (please don’t ask why), giving the male cast (De Niro, Peter Vack, Adam DeVine, Zack Pearlman) a chance to access and spoof Ocean’s Eleven and its characters. We could cut this long sequence out entirely, and very nicely.

Writer-director Nancy Meyers again proves very talented, as with It’s Complicated (2009) and Something’s Gotta Give (2003), but here she puts three steps wrong. One, she lets a genre comedy run to 121 minutes when 100 minutes is about right: and, two, she starts up a De Niro-Rene Russo old folk’s romance and just lets it stall and die there on screen; and three she demonises Jules’s nice hubby; and, four, her screenplay ends up in a vale of sentimentality.

It’s entirely amusing and funny for the first hour or so, ideal material. All Meyers needed to do was cut the fat in the middle and cut the crap at the end and she’d have a great comedy. As it is, it’s s good one. Now this is a shame. Great comedies are rare.

I’m prompted to say there’s no country for old men, but Hollywood is one, and Meyers has found a pretty good way of employing De Niro in a mainstream main role that should do his long-running, never faltering career no harm at all. Once De Niro found a way to be funny with Analyse This, spoofing his screen image, he’s never looked back.

He can do this kind of thing standing on his head, but he does it extremely well. It can only work if the star is fully committed and full on, and he is. Hathaway can do this kind of thing standing on her head, too, and she’s as likable, attractive and appealing as always. De Niro and Hathaway share good screen chemistry, and another vehicle could profitably be found for them.

Vack, DeVine and Pearlman are funny as background characters. Nat Wolff appears for two seconds. Russo would be great if the role was better, she deserves much more screen time, but then the movie’s already 121 minutes!

It has general appeal but there is some suggestive content and brief strong language.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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