Meyers: The Intern (2015)

It’s no secret that Nancy Meyers has a fairly ugly worldview. As Hollywood’s favourite female chauvinist pig, she traffics in women who can only be autonomous, let alone feminist, once they’re given permission from their husbands, boyfriends and lovers. For the most part, that worldview is crystallised through romantic comedy, begging the question of how a Nancy Meyers film would look without romance, or in which romance played a side role. In some ways, that’s what The Intern offers, a film about friendship that often veers towards romantic comedy tropes but never quite succumbs to them, which perhaps explains why Meyers has described it as one of her most challenging screenplays to date. Set in Brooklyn, it’s about the CEO of an internet clothing retail company, Jules Austin (Anne Hathaway), whose struggle to remain in charge of her own start-up finds an unlikely ally in Ben Whittaker (Robert de Niro), the first recipient of her (supposedly) innovative senior intern program. Leaving aside the revolting fantasy that interns are simply financially secure professionals with too much time on their hands, the Meyers touches are just what you’d expect, and mostly constellate around a general hand-wringing about why and when men turned into boys, rather than good old-fashioned men. At the same time, though, the fact that there’s no romance per se here means that that worldview tends to hover, free-floating, around the characters, occasionally darting in to use them – somewhat arbitrarily – as mouthpieces, but present more as an ambience, a particular vision of both old and new Brooklyn money. In that sense, the characters feel as if they somewhat escape or transcend Meyers’ intentions, which also makes them among the most organic, autonomous and nuanced characters of her entire screenwriting career, although the performances also play a big role as well. Not only does De Niro really reel in the hamminess, but Hathaway is less wide-eyed than she’s ever been, and if the film has any real twist it’s in the way these two actors really bring out the best each other, lending their serendipitous synergy to the film in turn. What could so easily have devolved into the father-daughter romance – the patriarchal romance – that always seems to linger around Meyers’ universe instead becomes – at its best – a closely-observed and quite unique vision of the kind of exquisite friendship that rarely has much cache in big-budget Hollywood cinema, especially in a beautiful extended sequence that occurs about halfway through. At once Meyers’ most offensive film and yet featuring her least offensively drawn characters – or at least characters who manage to somehow get the better of her – it’s a conundrum that manages to offend and genuinely charm at the same time, and in that sense a fitting footnote to the baby-boomer romcoms of the 90s, even if romance is no longer on the table.