You have to accept a Nancy Meyers movie on its own terms. It just kind of sits, pleasantly, without much humor or smarts or even – if we’re being frank – feeling. Like when your breath is fine and you’re not too hungry, but you reach for that stick of gum anyway – comfort you don’t really need, but damn easy to chew on nonetheless.
There remains a qualitative scale to Meyers’ filmography, however; her movies fluctuate between amiable to unbearably trite. Formulaically, they blend some degree of romance with cloyingly familiar music and a cast of fast-talking, upper-middle-class white men and women. There might be a bit more sweep to them, as in the blandly melodramatic The Holiday, or some genuine intimacy, most notably with the Keaton/Nicholson two-hander Something’s Gotta Give. But when broken down to their parts, they share fundamental DNA.
As far as my personal Meyers-scale goes, I expected to like The Intern more than I did. Anne Hathaway’s a better and more connective performer than her weirdly antagonistic place in pop culture discourse would indicate, and Robert De Niro would seem an ideal fit in Meyers’ men-of-a-certain-age oeuvre – the writer-director has wrung out key performances from Alec Baldwin and Jack Nicholson, among others, in recent years. Meyers is also competent and observant enough where her premise – in which 70 year-old retired business exec. Ben Whittaker (De Niro) goes to intern for overworked start-up CEO Jules Ostin (Hathaway) – would ideally yield some amusing generational comedy. Plus, Linda Lavin, Rene Russo and Andrew Rannells in supporting roles? Something would have to give.
The Intern is a Meyers film that presents itself well – again, keeping on her scale – before completely disintegrating. Its thin surface (of expected Facebook gags and gorgeous Brooklyn side-streets) quickly cracks; when you look underneath, there’s nothing to see. In effect, Meyers churns out an especially hollow 90 minutes. She once again flirts with women and careerism, but rather than make a queasily conservative (or let’s say traditional) statement as she’s prone to do, she says precious little. Jules’ marriage is flailing because she’s too distant; her company is growing steadily, but there’s no doubting her excessive workload. And Ben solves the problem: he gives her a series of terrific advice lines, counsels her through her struggling marriage, pleads with her to hold onto her company rather than give up control to a more “experienced” CEO – “I hate to be the feminist here,” he quips – and, finally, does some tai chi with her in a gleaming public park. It’s criminally boring.
Meyers constantly skirts around intriguing territory in favor of comic bits that don’t land – most notably (and gratingly), Ben pals around with the younger, dorky, guy interns – and dramatic material that’s rendered cheap. We’re given hints of a deeply dysfunctional relationship between Jules and her mother (voiced by Mary Kay Place who, despite being off-screen, provides the film's sharpest humor), and the film’s one true tender moment comes when Ben reveals he’s widowed. But Jules’ struggles are restricted to standard marital conflicts, while Ben as a character is gradually stripped down – he eventually emerges as a mere function in Jules’ path towards epiphany.
I don’t mean to suggest that prickly complexity was expected, or even needed, here. But The Intern might represent Meyers’ most simplified effort: she’s working within a relatively interesting premise, one in which thorny questions might naturally bubble to the surface, but she paints over it with a thick layer of gloss. There’s simply not much to Jules beyond “overworked executive trying to have it all,” her hatred of not-blinking and affinity for hand sanitizer tossed in with the emotional logic of romancing babies. The other 20-something hotshots in her office are drawn with unfortunate typicality – the one notable woman besides Jules is either panicked or in tears; the men surrounding her are obnoxiously self-satisfied – and further, the film forces Ben into an ancillary position, unable to develop independently as a character. (To add insult to injury, the utter lack of diversity here, for a 2015 film set in hipster-y Brooklyn, is staggering.)
The movie never seems to exist in a recognizable reality, which would be fine if it weren’t trying so desperately to comment on prescient generational and gender-specific divides. The actors try their best to sell it, though. Hathaway has had a less-than-stellar post-Oscar career, which might explain her presence in this flatly inessential dramedy. But even here, she reminds that she deserves better. She crushes the teary moments, plays the comedy with gusto and keeps Jules centered even when Meyers’ writing has a tendency to veer her towards the edge. Above all else, she’s credible. De Niro, meanwhile, is terrific when given the opportunity. He plays Ben with an optimistic melancholy that’s quite affecting, and his face – by God, his face – is ridiculously, hilariously expressive (a tic Meyers cleverly nods to late in the film). Plus, these two have a surprisingly easy chemistry. Their rapport is natural and tender, allowing the film to feel more authentic than it often has any right to.
The Intern is having a more-than-respectable run at the box office, proof that even with changing tastes and times, Meyers meets a certain demand. Her latest is a dud, to be clear, but its director’s appeal is nonetheless apparent: the pouring of the morning coffee, the consciously humanistic focus, the score reminiscent of a good bad-movie-night-in. The Intern is pure Nancy Meyers. Like that stick of gum, you chew it, and it’s agreeably habitual – but at a certain point, the thing gets stale. The taste fades away, and before long you’re waiting for the right moment to spit it out.
Grade: C-