The Intern (Movie Review)

Rating:

The 1-4-0: #TheIntern is a lovable, touching father-daughter like New York movie, in the tradition of Nora Ephron, which showcases an emotional performance from Robert De Niro. Get ready for a happy cry!

The Gist: The young Brooklyn CEO of an e-commerce start-up (Anne Hathaway) is assigned a senior intern (Robert De Niro) who is 70 years old. Their father-daughter like relationship creates some wonderful scenes.

What Works: Nancy Meyers is a master at capturing a mood, one that is prosperous, posh, aspirational and fun. It might not represent the real world, but it does represent an escape from reality, and cinema, apart from an art form, is escapism at its best. These lifestyle-fantasy films where the jokes are safe and the objective is to always make the paying audience feel-good, resonate with many moviegoers. She achieves this with the help of her protagonists. Anne Hathaway provides an endearing and sentimental performance, but it is Robert De Niro who goes for the jugular. He has such an uncanny knack for causing you to care deeply for the characters he portrays, and here, we smile with him, laugh with him, and also cry with him, a happy cry as my wife says. We have seen him display these traits in previous films such as, Everybody’s Fine (a performance that should’ve garnered him an Oscar nod) and Silver Lining’s Playbook (which did).

Hathaway on her end, is an Oscar winning actor with tremendous depth and talent, but the only roles which seem to last the longest in the minds of the collective audiences are these types – the smart, happy, stylish, good-natured woman – much like her role in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. This is where she shines the brightest. I can see her becoming the Meg Ryan of our generation, if she so desires it.

What Doesn’t Work: The movie isn’t perfect. If any criticism should be raised against it, it should be in the second half. It is uneven, some scenes are stretched out and padded with thin dialogue, sequences needed to blend in better from one plot to the other, and the resolution of Hathaway’s marriage woes didn’t seem realistically achievable. Nevertheless, with the charm in full stride, it’s hard for the given defects to distract.

Pay or Nay: Pay, pay, pay. I absolutely love these types of movies! The ones that allow us to come face to face with the lifestyle blueprint of who we wish we could be. It produces the “good-feeling goodies” inside us, and anytime one can be that happy, it’s an investment of time worth making.