Movie Review: The Intern
The Intern takes on many different roles in order to become the missing link in the lives of those whom surround him. Robert De Niro plays the intern, Ben Whittaker, a retired 70 year old widower who is longing to be wanted, so he decides to apply for a job at About The Fit, a web start up, burgeoning company.
He quickly gets along with everyone in the office and lends a helping hand to everyone but the woman who he was assigned to help, who constantly refuses to take his assistance. Jules Ostine takes pride in knowing that as a thirty year old woman, she runs a highly successful company that caters to the needs of all women who shop online, who don’t want to spend a lot of money on clothing, and who want to make sure that what they order will fit them suitably. She single-handedly started her business and worked endlessly until she passed her five year goal in five months. She tries her best to get rid of Ben, because she doesn’t need help from anyone, in fact she believes everyone needs help from her.
Jules is constantly contradicts herself, running her business with an iron fist, inflicting fear into all of her employees, yet acting as an indecisive, free spirit, she rides her bike in the office, and repeatedly tells Ben, not to wear his suit because she wants the atmosphere in the office to feel casual and relaxed. Director Nancy Meyers shows her beliefs in Freud’s anti-feminist teachings, by making Jules unconventional, unpunctual, and unsure of what she wants and herself, because a successful women can never have it all. Jules’ need to have full control over all aspects of her company hinted to her overcompensation of the one portion of her life that she actually had some control over.
Although Jules is initially uninterested and perturbed in her company’s senior intern program, she soon realizes that it may be the best thing that’s ever happened to her. Ben gains attention from Jules by doing the one thing that she seems to be sure that she wants someone to do, clean up the messy desk in the middle of her well organized office. After, what seems like days, in movie time, of ignoring her kind, mannerly, old intern, she begins to notice his loyalty and attentiveness. This allows her to finally place trust in someone other than herself. She soon develops a strong relationship with the one person she wanted nothing to do with. Ben eventually becomes her everything, a business partner that she can seek approval from, a parental figure who gives her the love that her mother never did, and in many weird instances throughout the film, the type of husband who tries to incorporate her in the life of her daughter, and who is sympathetic to her needs and doesn’t mind laying down in bed with her at night after a long day of work.
After receiving the news that all of her staff members feel like she should hire a more experienced CEO to run the company that she founded, she finally crumbles, not to mention that her husband is cheating on her, with a mother from her daughter’s school who has no respect for her, because she isn’t a stay at home mom. Little by little, as she begins to further let Ben into her life, he with a little help from his side-kicks, Davis (Zack Pearlman), Jason (Adam DeVine), and Lewis (Jason Orley) uses his wits, wisdom and surprisingly his driver’s license to steal a computer from Jules mother, in the only really comical scene throughout the entire movie and to fix Jules life in and outside of the office. You can tell that the Director Nancy Meyers is used to making romantic comedies, by the uncomfortable to watch, semi-flirtation between the young thirty year old over-achiever and her 70 year old retired employee who teaches her to relax and take hold of her life. Jules had more love scenes with Ben, than she did with her insensitive, meek husband, Matt. Jules admiration for Ben’s old-fashioned work ethic and overall warmth towards everyone comes off a little too passionate sometimes, as if she has a crush on him and doesn’t know how to act on her feelings. Ben on the other hand, who looks out for her in every way, acts as an over protective father who fights between wanting to let her make her own decisions and making sure she doesn’t get hurt.
Typical to most of Meyers work, she compliments her writing ability in an early scene, when Cameron (Andrew Rannells) tells Ben that his application video, the beginning portion of the film when he is telling his story to his cam-quarter, made the entire office cry. Her inability to write anything other than a romantic, family film was shown through the movie being too long and not having a proper conclusion. It was a great film, with many amazing, heart-felt scenes that would either make you laugh or cry but for a movie that was two hours long and felt like four hours, it should have had a better ending. Ending it the way it started may have seemed like an obvious, great choice to Meyers, but to the viewers, all of the cliffhangers left us wanting a part two to the movie which we’re most likely never going to get.
