Gone are the days when Robert De Niro could be relied upon to provide gritty performances in high caliber films. At this juncture, it seems pointless to bemoan his descent into Schmaltzville. De Niro seems to have taken up permanent residence there.
In The Intern, he portrays Ben Whittaker, a former business executive. He had spent 40 years working for a Brooklyn firm that had published telephone books before it folded. How’s that as a symbol for anachronism? Why not just make Ben an erstwhile blacksmith?
The septuagenarian widower has grown bored with the ennui of retirement. Traveling and other activities do nothing to assuage it. Apparently, it has never occurred to Ben to become a volunteer in a hospital or a little league coach or engage in some other rewarding activity.
One day, Ben spots a flyer soliciting oldsters to become senior interns at About the Fit, an e-Commerce fashion site. It just happens to be located in the building housing Ben’s firm before it folded. Does it seem plausible that Ben would be eager to rush on down to work as an unpaid intern there? Does it make any sense that an Internet site would hire someone who doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer?
Ben becomes the personal intern to Jules Osten (Anne Hathaway), founder and president of the couture retailer. One problem: Jules doesn’t really want an intern, especially one who is the age of her parents.
Will Ben win Jules over by his sheer conscientiousness? Will his veneration of traditionalism prompt Jules to experience an epiphany and reject millennial values? This is a film that elevates the importance of men always carrying a handkerchief to being a key plot point. After all, you just never know when a woman will have an emotional break down and start crying uncontrollably. Is that patronizing enough for you?
The meretricious quality of the narrative might be forgivable if only the iconography weren’t so offensive. The Intern postures as a feminist film. It purportedly celebrates the capabilities of women. After all, here we have a female, who is the founder of a wildly successful company. It has rapidly grown and she now has more than 200 employees. However, the portrait of Jules’ personal attributes is hardly congruent with her accomplishments.
The Devil Wears Prada offers an excellent frame of reference. You might expect Jules to be a younger version of the flinty, self-assured Miranda Priestly, memorably portrayed by Meryl Streep in that film. Instead, Hathaway reprises her own character from that vehicle. Once again, she is a neurotic girly girl, plagued with intermittent brain spasms and a profound lack of self-confidence. Whatever can this poor, pathetic creature possibly do without a mainstream male to come to her rescue?
Feminist? I don’t think so. Despite its pretensions, The Intern presents a distaff co-protagonist who is ditzy and insecure. The film perpetuates demeaning stereotypes of woebegone women.
It should come as no surprise that this film was written and directed by Nancy Meyers. She is culpable for such prior dreck as Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday and It’s Complicated. The Intern is a contrived and farfetched exercise in blandness, saddled with a stridently anti-feminist message.
The Intern
**
Anne Hathaway
Robert De Niro
Directed by Nancy Meyers
PG-13
