Review of The Intern (2015) by Nattttt N — 07 Apr 2017

The intern tells the story of Ben Withaker, a widowed 70 year old retired successful businessman, wonderfully played by Robert De Niro. Ben has taken Einstein's quote 'Life is like riding a bicycle.

To keep your balance, you must keep moving.' to heart. As he struggles to keep himself occupied with, yoga, tai chi, mandarin and violin classes, and ignoring the advances of various senior ladies, he manages to land an internship to an overgrown start up that struggles to keep up with its own success.

The founder and CEO Jules Ostin (Ann Hathaway) is a success driven woman on her early thirties. Jules, with unconventional methods and business vision has driven her once small business, About The Fit, to the top list of fashion e-commerce sites.

During the first good part of the movie Meyer's makes great use of De Niro's charisma to portray the angst and fears of a whole generation that more often than not is too easily dismissed and ignored.

As De Niro predictively proofs himself valuable and wins over the millennials who at first looked down on him, the viewer starts to fall in love with the chemistry that an enthusiastic Hathaway and De Niro build up.

We like the pair, and it shows. Ben is respectful, dresses in a suit, keeps his cool and basically does everything better than everybody else. The senior man invisibly brings to Jules life, that has been overtaken by fast paced meetings and 14 hour working days, much needed support and calmness.

As the film progresses, Meyers slowly drifts the focus away from Ben's impact on About The Fit, to focus on the founder's life. Jules is married to a stay at home dad, with whom she has an adorable 9 year old daughter.

Her family feels that she is not giving them enough attention, while the investors are pressuring her to hire a new CEO. Here, the Meyer's work hits and elbow point, and slowly becomes more about proving a point than telling a compelling story.

We painfully see how the movie degenerates into a rant about feminism, relationships, success, manlyhood and well, so many disperse things that it resembles more to a 3am Tumblr post than an A-list studio production.

For most of its running time The Intern gets off to De Niro's amiability and Hathaway high energy, but as the movie progresses to the end we are left with a bitter-sweet aftertaste. We can't help but think that Meyers did to the intern what a freshman college student does to his midterm paper.

It starts promising, but the spectator quickly ends up feeling like a literature professor reading a paper pushed trough with unhealthy amounts of caffeine.