Nancy Meyers has spent a career building rooms people want to live in — bright kitchens, big windows, adults who talk in complete sentences. The Intern hands her a new one: a Brooklyn e-commerce startup called About the Fit, all exposed brick and folding tables, and drops a 70-year-old widower into the middle of it. The film is warm, well acted and almost entirely weightless. It runs 121 minutes and never once makes you feel the weight of the premise it keeps announcing.
“Experience never gets old.”
That is the tagline, and it is also the whole argument. Robert De Niro plays Ben Whittaker, a retired executive from Dex One who discovers that retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He applies for a newly created position — senior intern — at About the Fit, the fast-growing fashion startup founded and run by Jules Ostin, played by Anne Hathaway. He impresses everyone, lands one of three senior intern slots, and gets assigned to the CEO, who is skeptical at first and ignores him.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Ben Whittaker and the messy desk
The film’s best stretch is its quietest. Ben wins over his co-workers with his congeniality and his helpful advice on life and work. He organizes a longtime messy desk that Jules has been agonizing about, and that single act wins her good graces. It is a small scene about a small competence, and it is the one place the movie trusts its own idea.
Then it stops trusting it. Looking out a window, Ben notices Jules’s chauffeur drinking. He goes outside, persuades the man to leave, and drives Jules home himself. The next day her driver doesn’t show, so Becky asks Ben to pick her up. He asks Jules some personal questions. She asks her VP Cameron to reassign him.
That evening they bond when she learns he worked for nearly 40 years in the same building About the Fit now occupies. The next morning she finds out Cameron has replaced Ben with Doris, a terrible driver who nearly crashes. Jules apologizes, begs him to come back, and he does.
The email, the break-in, and the plot that eats the movie
From there The Intern starts stacking set pieces where the premise used to be. Ben begins a relationship with Fiona, About the Fit’s in-house massage therapist, played by Rene Russo. When Jules accidentally sends a scathing email about her mother to her mother, Ben volunteers to take some co-workers to break into her mother’s house and delete it from her mother’s computer. They narrowly avoid getting caught by the police.
It is a comedy beat grafted onto a movie that was working fine without one. The break-in is not funny enough to justify itself and not tense enough to matter. It exists because the second act needed a second act.
A cast doing more than the script asks
De Niro is the reason any of this holds. He plays Ben without a single wink, and the performance is genuinely likable — a man who is competent, unbothered and quietly pleased to be useful again. Hathaway has the harder job. Jules is a workaholic CEO with a husband, Matt, played by Anders Holm, who gave up his own very successful career to be a stay-at-home parent, and the film keeps asking her to be both the boss and the apology.
The supporting cast is deep and mostly wasted. Andrew Rannells as Cameron, Adam Devine as Jason, Zack Pearlman as Davis, Jason Orley as Lewis, Christina Scherer as Becky, Nat Wolff as Justin and Linda Lavin as Patty all get moments, none get arcs. JoJo Kushner plays Paige Ostin, Jules and Matt’s daughter.
What About the Fit gets right about work
Give Meyers this: she understands offices. About the Fit feels like a real startup — too many people, too few chairs, a founder who answers everything herself because delegating takes longer than doing. The film is sharper about that than most movies that claim to be about work.
The problem is what it does with the observation. Every tension the movie raises — Jules’s marriage, her investors, whether she should sell — gets resolved by Ben being decent at it. He is not a character so much as a solvent.
The marriage subplot goes nowhere
Matt’s sacrifice is the most interesting fact in the film and the film barely touches it. A man who gave up a successful career to raise his daughter, married to a woman whose company is now worth more than either of them planned for — that is a movie. The Intern mentions it, then moves on to the next thing Ben can fix.
Jules’s mother, the email, the break-in: all of it resolves cleanly. Nothing costs anyone anything they don’t recover from inside the same scene.
Warner Bros. released it on September 25, 2015
The Intern opened on September 25, 2015, from Warner Bros. Pictures. It grossed $195 million worldwide against a $35 million production budget. Reviews were mixed, though De Niro and Hathaway’s performances were the parts most often singled out for praise.
That split is the honest read of the movie. The performances are the product. The script is the packaging.
By the numbers
- Title: The Intern
- Release date: September 25, 2015
- Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
- Director and writer: Nancy Meyers
- Runtime: 121 minutes
- Genre: Comedy
- Production budget: $35 million
- Worldwide gross: $195 million
- Metacritic: 51/100
- Our score: 5.1/10
What the movie actually believes
The Intern believes experience is a gift you can hand to younger people, and that the handing is enough. It is a nice thought. It is not a story.
Meyers has made this movie before, better, because she used to let her leads want things they couldn’t have. Here, Ben wants to be useful and is. Jules wants to keep her company and does. There is no friction left after the first hour, and a comedy without friction is just a series of pleasant rooms.
The film’s one real idea — that a 70-year-old man and a 30-something CEO might need the same thing, which is to be taken seriously — gets stated in dialogue and never dramatized. Ben’s age is a running joke and occasionally a plot device. It is never a problem he has to solve.
Where the movie leaves you
The Intern is a soft movie that mistakes gentleness for depth. De Niro and Hathaway are good enough to make you wish the script had given them something to push against, and the About the Fit setting is more specific and more alive than the story built inside it. The break-in sequence is a detour. The marriage subplot is a promise the film doesn’t keep. The messy desk is the only scene that earns its place.
It is not a bad way to spend 121 minutes. It is also not a movie that will stay with you past the credits, and the tagline — “Experience never gets old” — is doing more work than the film around it.
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