Sometimes romantic comedies have the ability to surprise me. Full disclosure, I have a soft spot for Hugh Grant’s escapades of the early noughties (including Love Actually and the Bridget Jones series). The Intern, however, is not going to join those titles. This is the latest outing from Nancy Meyers, who gave us It’s Complicated, Something’s Got to Give and the Holiday, and although I have never seen the former two, I found the Holiday to be a surprisingly pleasant film featuring decent performances from an A-list cast and enough tender moments to keep me interested. This, coupled with the promise of seeing Anne Hathaway (Interstellar, Rachel Getting Married) and Robert De Niro (King of Comedy, Heat) working together, gave me a feeling of optimism and put me in the mood for enjoying a fairly non-challenging romantic comedy. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed as this film failed to meet the relatively low bar that I was setting and, furthermore, baffled me with its confused messages on gender equality and its utterly misjudged comic relief.
Robert De Niro plays a gentleman in his 70s who has worked & retired, loved & lost; he is finding that there is a gap in his life that can only be filled by getting back into the working world. Anne Hathaway plays the “kooky” boss of an up-and-coming fashion firm whose company (unbeknownst to her) is piloting a “senior interns” programme which results in De Niro getting the titular job. She’s hip, she’s young, Anne Hathaway’s got not time for an old fossil talking about the past; will she warm to De Niro and learn some valuable lessons along the way? Place your bets now.
From the get-go, the film languishes with a very tepid pace. De Niro gives us a “heart-felt” off-screen monologue about his life and the position he’s found himself in, which he performs with the same amount of gusto as when he played a cabbage on Sesame Street. His performance never gets out of that first gear; he talks calmly, he makes funny faces, he offers sage advice and that is all he has to offer during the film’s running time. Most of the time, it’s boring almost to the point of being comical, but sometimes it comes across as entirely inappropriate. The budding office romance that De Niro cultivates with Rene Russo (Major League, Nightcrawler), who plays the office masseuse, is the best example of this. This romance-for-the-ages starts when Russo gives De Niro a lower back/butt massage in the middle of the office, leading the excited De Niro having to hastily conceal the evidence of his approval with a newspaper. The results are awkward and De Niro’s “pleasure face” is something that I don’t want to see again anytime soon. Unluckily for me, Nancy Meyers thought this scene was so good, the audience deserved to see it twice. The whole thing is repeated, but this time with a foot massage in Russo’s office, which is “hilariously” interrupted by a co-worker. If the buds of this romance were an experiment in impropriety then this only gets pushed further as it flowers. Their first date, which was meant to be an inoffensive lunch affair, quickly descends when De Niro gets called to an impromptu funeral of a friend and he decides that this would be an entirely appropriate place to bring a date along to. Leaving the baffling concept of an “impromptu funeral” (as if a friend has suddenly died and the family have been able to organise the funeral for the same day and send invitiations to close friends, all without any prior knowledge on De Niro’s part), the image of De Niro and Russo giggling like little schoolchildren, post-wake, with party bag in hand and jesting about how crazy and kooky a date that was is inappropriate to the point that it is sickening.
Anne Hathaway puts in a much more solid performance as a woman in a high pressure job struggling to balance her work and family life. Out of the two leads, her character comes across as the more three dimensional and helped get me immersed back into the film during the middle act. The main problem with her character, and in fact, the biggest issue I had with the film, was that I get the impression that the director was trying to use her to make a statement about gender politics (both at work and at home) but this message was entirely confused, and at times, misogynistic.
On paper, her character is a strong and creative person. She is the director of a company, constantly fighting against forces that repeatedly say she can’t do her job without the support of a male CEO and that her family life is suffering because of it. The way the film deals with this conflict is very much on the side of Hathaway’s character and can be seen to have a progressive message. However, it’s Hathaway’s relationship with De Niro where the message starts to get more confused. Initially, Hathaway starts appreciating De Niro for the useful bits of advice he has, or his calming “slow things down” approach to business. However, this relationship very quickly turns into some sort of patriarchal figure that Hathaway feels that she has to gain acceptance from.
This is best highlighted in the bar scene in which Hathaway decides to have (shock horror) three whole tequila shots, all to the back drop of De Niro constantly nagging ‘you’re not gonna have another one, are you?’, ‘you really should stop drinking’. The way the film portrays this, we’re supposed to think that De Niro is in the right, and not that he should really keep his nose the hell out of how much his boss is ‘allowed’ to drink. Just before this Hathaway, has made a speech about how much she appreciates De Niro and laments the end of the old fashioned depiction of what a man should be. This speech gets all the more awkward when she implies that women have been given too much empowerment and even questions, what about male empowerment? This whole scene ends with Hathaway throwing up into a dumpster whilst De Niro holds back her hair, because of course, men are always right and will be there to clean up a woman’s mistakes.
The whole film is littered with oddly sexist segments like that. De Niro’s sage advice includes statements like men should always carry handkerchiefs because women always cry. He is confronted by Hathaway’s disgruntled secretary, who is understandably upset that he is getting much more recognition than her from the boss despite his short time in the business compared to her years of service and extra hours put in to keep the place running. De Niro replies that she should get more sleep because women who don’t get sleep get fat. Instead of an ordinary human response to this (namely anger and insult), the secretary then breaks down because she doesn’t want to get fat. De Niro, using his advise from earlier, signals to a male work colleague (who by the way cheated on the secretary with her roommate and is trying to get back into her good books with cheap tricks instead of developing as a person) to swoop in with the handkerchief ’cause dames can’t say no to a man with a handkerchief.
At some point, I thought that De Niro’s “old fashioned” attitude to doing business would get him into trouble or cause some sort of conflict that lead to some major character development justifying those horrendous moments mentioned above (to be honest, I was expecting a big racism bomb), but it didn’t. He just kept being viewed as a generally nice guy going round the office giving handy bits of advice and being globally adored. The film’s plot devices were clumsy and uninteresting; De Niro didn’t develop as a person and Hathaway’s development felt backwards. The conflicts in the film were minor and easily resolved, which isn’t even mentioning the large chunks of the plot that seemed to be just added in for the hell of it (like the prior mentioned “comic relief” scenes and a whacky heist that came out of nowhere). Furthermore, the ending had no impact or resonance. It may as well have finished with De Niro declaring “my work here is done” and wandering down to the next office.
This film has many fatal problems, but maybe I would try harder to look past its clumsiness, lack of pacing, lazy acting and hell, even its misogyny, If I hadn’t been forced to see Robert De Niro’s orgasm face twice in one film.
Auteurs' Hors D'oeuvres 