The Intern

In The Intern Nancy Meyers engagingly blends the old and new in terms of cinema, technology and feminism. 

Hero Ben is a feminist from the outset because his late wife Molly was a middle school principal, i.e., a woman who combined success in family and in administration. So Ben appreciates the old feminism as well as the new that he sees in Jules (a man’s name feminized by its homonym Jewels). As Jules notes, “It's 2015, are we really still critical of working moms?” Well, yeah, so Ben has to teach the other playground Moms the pride they should take in Jules’s success.  
In business Ben unpacks his glass case, clock, calculator, pens, all superannuated — before launching into the computer world. He makes friends in the flesh as well as on Facebook. However new he may be to new tech, his old savvy in business, style and human relations proves a boon to the others. One young guy buys a classic briefcase on eBay. 

Robert De Niro is an affable Old Man in the New Age spirit. He actually weeps a bit, sentimental mush that he admits to being. The established old geezer occupies the same role in the casting as his character does in the plot — he’s the man of experience and wisdom who provides a model for the young bloods. 

De Niro could be on the list of old actors that Jules cites as the lost generation of Men: Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson. The film clip of Gene Kelly evokes an even earlier generation of softer, romantic men, suggesting the cycle of changing styles in film manhood. De Niro even plays against his own persona, when he serves as Jules’s driver and when, before his interview, he rehearses his looks in the mirror. Shades of “You talkin’ to me?” The heist scene is described as an Ocean’s 11 play but it also harkens back to De Niro’s Scorsese gangster period. 

As Jules, Anne Hathaway exercises her own reputation as a difficult person to work with. Her boss character here is a promotion from the harried gofer she played in The Devil Wears Prada. She’s warmer and more effective than the earlier Meryl Streep character.

Jules’s drunken bar speech is central: as girls have grown into women on the American social landscape  men have reverted to boys. Her husband is as sloppy, effete and juvenile as Ben’s workmates. The husband had a brilliant career ahead of him, prioritized Jules’s to become a stay-at-home father, then slips into the tired old cliche of adulterer. 

     The film is sensible in playing a 70-year-old as a sane, capable person, even still capable of having a sex life. Ben’s affair with Fiona is played with taste and discretion. Some might add “hope.”
     The film’s one weak spot is its treatment of the shorter, homelier, much more wrinkled woman who pursues Ben and gives him the finger when she sees him with Fiona. Both in script and direction Meyers shows such sensitivity and grace in this film that it’s disappointing to see her lapse here into the cliche comedy of the predatory crone. Rene Russo gives Fiona a dignity and attractiveness that might have also been accorded the other woman. Instead Meyers went for the cheap laugh — in an otherwise more serious work.