The story is that Ben Whittaker, a 70-something man, retired and a widower, finds it difficult to find meaning in his life, and when he sees an ad for a company seeking senior citizen interns, he applies, and he gets the position. The company is a new upstart that sells clothes online. It was started by Jules Ostin, a woman in her 30s, and she remains the boss. But the stress and strain of the work means she is on the edge of hitting the wall, and her marriage and family life are suffering. She has trouble sleeping and she does not eat enough. The dichotomy is clear. He is an old man, patient, calm, quiet, with set routines and very little to do; she is a young-ish woman, impatient, stressed, all over the place and with too much to do. They are played to perfection by Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway.
That is the first reason for why I like the film so much, the acting. Delicate, nuanced, genuine, and perfectly believable. Hathaway is not unknown to play such a character, but to see De Niro is such a part, as a calm, stable, serious, genuinely good, non-threatening, person, is unusual. (I am not saying he never has played such a part, only that it is not a typical role.)
Another reason is how good the film looks; it positively glows. The cinematographer is Stephen Goldblatt, an old hand at this. He has previously worked with Francis Ford Coppola, Tony Scott, Joel Schumacher and Mike Nichols, so this is comparatively mundane, stylistically, but he makes every space shine, to look warm and comforting, which is a central part of Meyers's general style. Feng shui cinema.
That was the craft of the film. But I also like what it is about and how it deals with the issues it has set up.
Ben (De Niro) is old-school and out of date, he is celebrated but as something from the past, whereas Jules (Hathaway) is the present. Ben becomes a hero for the young people at the office, a mentor and father-figure. With his professionalism and unassuming manner, he brings stability and organisation to the company. But he could not run it as he is like a stranger in the modern world, unfamiliar with the internet and with computers. It is Jules's company, and it is her world now. But the argument in the film is that we need both past and present in order to make for a better future. Ben can be a celebrated and important person, even though he firmly remains of the past, and has to give way to younger generations, and part of the reason why he is heroic is precisely because he willingly gives way. He does not try to impose himself, and he does not feel any kind of resentment to being replaced by the young ones, or women.
This passing of the torch is underlined in one of the best scenes of the film, one of its most moving moments. Ben and Jules are working late, and she asks where he worked before he retired. He tells about his job, and eventually it becomes clear that the office he used to work in was located in the same building in which they are now. His former company made telephone books, and had the whole building. But telephone books are no longer needed, so the company is gone, and Jules's online shop has taken over the building. He then points to a spot in the building and he says that that is where his desk used to be, by the window. It is an understated, beautiful scene, which always makes me cry, and which also encapsulates a key theme in the film. Change is inevitable, time moves on, and we need to change and adapt with it.
One interesting aspect of the film is its lack of closure. The main conflict and arc in the film is whether Jules should let go of her role as the boss of her company, and hire a CEO. As mentioned above, she works too much and the stress is palpable. Yet she is reluctant to let someone else come in and take over. In the end, partly thanks to Ben's support, she decides against it and will carry on herself, like before. But this means that she is back where she was when the film began. The workload and strain remain the same. She has neither gained nor lost anything by the end of the film, regarding work. Ben on the other hand has gained a lot. New friends, a new purpose, and a new love interest (played by Rene Russo). But Jules wants to take that gamble. She made this company, and she needs to stay with it. What she has to do is to manage her time better, and delegate more. There is no clear suggestion in the end of the film that she will do so, but since she leaves the office in the last scene, and joins Ben in his tai chi class, it might be assumed that she will at least make an effort to calm down.
Meyers's other films are romantic comedies but this is not that. Instead it is a drama, and instead being about romantic couples, it is about a friendship across generations, moving and beautiful. Films about two people becoming friends are in general a rare thing, which is a shame, but The Intern shows how to do it. It is a meeting between two people who, even though they did not know it, needed each other, and who build their friendship out of a deep respect for the other person. This is a special kind of love. I mentioned above one specific scene that was the peak of the theme of time passing, and one generation taking over from another. There is also a scene that is the peak of their friendship, and that is when they go to San Francisco for a business meeting, and during the night they have a talk about their lives. She says that her one big fear in life is to die alone, and not being buried with someone else, and he says that she can be buried in the same grave as he and his wife. The wife is already there, but there is plenty of room. That scene too always makes me cry.
***
I love The Intern, as might be clear already, but it has some weaknesses. I let Manohla Dargis point them out:
The table [a place in the office which is messy and disorganised] is a silly, lazy screenwriting contrivance, and it says more about Ms. Meyers’s conflicted ideas about powerful women than it conveys anything interesting about Jules. A successful Hollywood director like Ms. Meyers, for starters, would never have gotten this far and with a number of hits to her name if she had been afraid of telling other people what to do. But Ms. Meyers has some distinct ideas about women, work and power, and so she piles on the issues: Jules is chronically late to meetings, among other sins, although that seems to be because she likes riding slowly through the office on her bicycle. The bike suggests that she’s a nonconformist, although the neat rows of her pretty, young, overwhelmingly white employees doing something in front of their computers suggest otherwise.
There are some other things in the writing that are questionable too (such as the character Becky, Jules's assistant), but these things do not matter all that much to me.
The dominating kind of film of the last decade or so has been superhero films, which purports to be about heroism, leadership, and sacrifice. But none of them can compete with the quiet heroism and genuine leadership that is celebrated in The Intern; a hymn to ordinariness and basic human decency and kindness.
