Cinematic Releases: The Intern

Formula grows tired with The Intern.

"Haha! It was this big!"

Joining the trope of cutesy “older and wiser meets younger and feisty” is Hollywood’s newest fragmentary duo, played by the quirky and chummy Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. The big studio production of a large scale rom-com is dolefully withered by the lack of poignant storyline and rigid chemistry of Hathaway and De Niro, and replaced with mismatched plotlines and uneven messages. Nancy Meyers, who has brought us timeless gems like It’s Complicated and Something’s Gotta Give, seems to have missed the mark with this one, almost feverishly throwing together multiple plot lines and hoping they’ll all sew themselves together like they did in the late ‘90s.

Hathaway plays Jules Ostin, a self-reliant boss of her own e-commerce clothing company in Brooklyn, and for someone of her own caliber it almost seems as if she was sat down and instructed to “tone down” her atypical aggressive personality in favor of creating the sleeper rom-com of the decade. On the other side of town, Ben Whittaker, a retired, widowed and sociable guy responds to an ad posted by Ostin’s company About The Fit looking for a ‘senior intern’. He’s a swell, likeable “uncle”-type who has more free time on his hands to do more things – like interning at a blossoming Dot Com. The Intern seems to reach its own external cues of cut-and-dry scenes with little effort and does a bantam effort at not going outside the usual cookie cutter template of its genre.

In contrast, the standout performance doesn’t come from De Niro exactly, but rather from newcomer JoJo Kushner, playing Hathaway’s charming daughter, purposefully placed throughout the film to offer comedic relief as well as a safe distraction from the constant reminder of the film’s layering trails of storylines. The Intern seems to reach its own external cues of cut-and-dry scenes with little effort and does a bantam effort at not going outside the usual cookie cutter stigma of its film genre. A majority of the time is spent shoving Whittaker into unlikely situations we would assume to be true of all senior citizens, but perhaps that’s where the suggested “comedy” bit fits into the “romantic comedy” phrase of its kind.

"Oh my! You weren't lying.
That's just shocking."

Admitting that The Intern is a comedy is a stretch, though, even for the high expectations that were brought with some pretty perfect editing in the trailers. Although the rest of the cast was minor they were more of a collective series of amusing events that, when tied together, comprise something less than what Intern could have brought. What the movie lacked entirely was a solid line of consistency. The overall feel is familiar and sweet, but brought with seldom undertones of witty and almost grueling sequence of missed opportunities for two unlikely friends to become chums. 

-Sarah Shafer

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