The Intern: Nancy Meyers

I can understand why a lot of people may not have liked Nancy Meyers' The Intern: it's a film where an elderly man swoops in and essentially "fixes" a young woman's start-up company, proving that his more conservative ways are better and more effective than those of a young career woman. But judging The Intern from a context of "older and masculine" triumphing over "younger and feminine" is to entirely miss the point of the film. If anything, Robert De Niro's 70-year old widower Ben Whittaker teaches self-respect and calmness: it's not that men should wear suits to work, it's that men should take pride in their appearance; it's not that Anne Hathaway's workaholic CEO Jules Ostin should drop her business duties and focus solely on her family, it's that she needs to find a way to balance both without self-destructing. De Niro exudes time-tested wisdom and experience, not fundamentalist platitudes left over from the misogynist boardrooms and office buildings of the 1950s. The Intern does something seldom seen in modern dramas about generational conflict: suggest that both sides can learn from each other. Here is a movie that argues that the old aren't foolish and myopically set in their ways and that the young aren't empty-headed and immature.

7/10