Jay Betsill is a columnist for dfw.com, and appears on the WBAP Morning News each Friday previewing entertainment opportunities for the coming weekend. Jay also reviews films for us at WBAP.com.
Review: ‘The Intern’
By Jay Betsill
Scale of 1-10: 7
Review: ‘The Intern’
By Jay Betsill
Scale of 1-10: 7
70-year-old widower Ben Whittaker has discovered that retirement does not equal happiness so he jumps at the opportunity to get back in the game and takes a senior intern at a popular online fashion site that is run by its founder Jules Ostin. That’s the basis of the new film from writer-director Nancy Meyers, The Intern starring Academy Award winners Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway.
“Love and work, work and love, that’s all there is,”De Niro’s Whitaker quotes Freud as the movie opens. Sandwiched between his morning trip to Starbucks to read the newspaper and visits to the park for Tai chi classes are days of loneliness and boredom.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway), the founder and president of Brooklyn-based fashion e-commerce company About the Fit. She micromanages every detail of her increasingly successful business including taking customer service calls and riding her bicycle around the office in order to save time, much to the detriment of her attempts at balancing it with her home life with her husband and daughter.
Whittaker had a successful career for over 40 years as vice president of a company that made phone books and views his opportunity and subsequent assignment as Ostin’s personal intern as a new lease on life. Ostin is under pressure from her investors to hire a new CEO to run her company that is far outperforming expectations and is reluctant to give any responsibility to her new intern.
The turning point in the movie comes when Whittaker steps in for Ostin’s personal driver and as she discovers that he is a kind and caring man, her intern essentially becomes her mentor in business and life and a genuine friend. The movie certainly benefits from the chemistry between De Niro and Hathaway and it scores points for not hinting at a generation-gap romance with the two characters. Whittaker is one of the more popular people in the office –especially with his fellow interns– as his advice comes across as wisdom and never in a patronizing manner that would have turned the movie into stereotypical sitcom fare. It’s only fitting that there would be a romantic subplot and our hero would have an innocent workplace romance with Fiona, the company’s house masseuse, played by Rene Russo.
Meyers’ other films including Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, What Women Want and The Holiday have been successful because they deliver what their audience is looking for. While it can be predictable at times, The Intern follows suit as a mainstream crowd pleaser and leaves the audience with a smile.
“The Intern” is rated PG-13 with a running time of 121 minutes and opens in theaters Sept. 25th
***ALL PHOTOS ARE “Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures”
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