2.5 stars (out of 5)
Writer/producer/director Nancy Meyers is known for coaxing nice performances out of nice actors in nice movies (What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, It’s Complicated), and in The Intern she gets a performance out of Robert De Niro that’s amongst his nicest ever. And yes, it’s very weird writing that too.
De Niro is 70 year old retired NY widower Ben Whittaker, whose boredom and loneliness leads him (however improbably) to take a job as a ‘senior intern’ at a new and (however improbably) booming ecommerce business, where he’s assigned (however improbably) the role of assistant, chauffeur and general dogsbody to the boss, the overworked, underfed and not-hugged-enough Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway, who gets lots of very Anne-Hathaway-esque smiley and/or weepy close-ups). Ben is such an upstanding guy that he can’t stop himself becoming best buds with all the young ‘uns in the office (as De Niro stretches his acting chops by working alongside inexperienced players almost 50 years his junior), and he also becomes indispensible to Jules, sorting out her life, offering goofy words of wisdom and being so damn sweet that it hurts.
Jules, of course, comes complete with a dickhead husband named Matt (Anders Holm) and a gormless little daughter named Paige (JoJo Kushner, obviously crying fake tears at one point), and they bring plenty of melodramatic subplots to the dopey tale, but this is primarily about Bobby and Anne, and they do, here and there, have a curious chemistry. And yet it is strange seeing De Niro playing a nice, normal old dude and not insane, edgy, enraged and/or emotionally constipated, and you also can’t help but think that Meyers’ movie would have worked better if he had shot someone.
I Wake Up Screening 