Retirement does not suit Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro). Some chapters may prove to be better than others, but ultimately each chapter adds to the overall richness of this life and challenge us to live each chapter as it is opened.
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“She’s now an arm’s length away”, she said, “I love that you’re getting this on camera”. But this film is more about the 32-year-old “Installer” actress who is portraying Jules in this sentimental Nancy Meyers comedy-drama. Ditto Hathaway, who could do the skittish career woman thing in her sleep by this point but hits all the familiar notes perfectly.
“The Intern” is a hard movie to discuss in detail because it’s wafer-thin, though at least in this instance I don’t necessarily see that as a drawback. Hathaway strains to create a credible basket case, but instead emerges as a bastion of clichéd, harried-working-gal tics and neuroses; it’s strongly implied that this woman’s only real problem is that she hasn’t had a kindly father figure around to tell her everything’s gonna be okay.
Q: Did making this film give you any extra insight into the intern experience? Maybe what he’s really trying to do is to give us a slice of a life that isn’t exactly charmed, but definitely charming; where older people have meaning, still participating in this exhausting modern life, but with a dash of relaxed confidence. What Nancy Meyers’s comedy will do is offer a fun, lighthearted romp featuring two heavyweight actors and a lovable supporting cast. But Jesus did this movie ever irritate me.
The dynamic between Ben and Jules is like a big warm hug. “And now I’m in my early 30s and I’m like, ‘Why did that 24-year-old get that part?” Jules makes a great speech about how her generation of young women were raised on Take Your Daughter to Work Day (I nearly burst into joyful tears hearing that, having worked on the program 20-odd years ago) and how men have just not kept up with women – that they have gone from George Clooney and Jack Nicholson (and Robert De Niro) to the schlubs she works with, who wear jeans and don’t shave and have man buns. Like the bloke he plays, De Niro gets the job done.
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Before he made the Hostel movies, Eli Roth directed 2003’s pungent little creep-out Cabin Fever, an evil-virus thriller suggesting that Roth totally understood the tenets of ’70s/’80s shock cinema and knew (like Tarantino and Rob Zombie do) how to deliver low-rent exhilaration and nausea to 21stCentury audiences.
