In “The Intern,” Nancy Meyers’s bullshit detector is ratcheted admirably high, which is why it’s all the more conspicuous when she relies on the movie to deliver her own line of bullshit. Looking at her target audience with an unsparing acuity, Meyers sketches a hard-edged portrait of a heroine of the times as well as a softball fantasy of the moment.
Admit it, the movie says—you like to shop, to shop online, to shop online even if you can’t really afford it, and when you do buy things online you expect things to be done right, and you notice the small details. Maybe you live in a grungy walkup—but you don’t want to, and if and when you succeed at what you do you’d like to own a clean place and fix it up your way.
You want to get married and have kids—to be a part of a family that you started of your own choosing, not merely an atom free of parents but part of a molecule of your own. If there’s something on the floor, you’ll pick it up; if there’s a mess, you’ll clean it. There’s an aesthetic pleasure in doing things right and a moral satisfaction in attentive action, in improving the world, even if only by the efficient grace of your presence. The poise is a kind of love, and it can also make you a fortune, and, if so, why not.
But the stringent standards that you set for yourself makes you self-critical and self-doubting, unduly insecure—and therefore needy, fast to take the mildest criticism to heart and redouble it, to receive it as a wounding blow and a definitive rejection. You also apply these standards to others, and become hard to please, easy to disappoint, and unable to delegate.
Therefore, often overtaxed with work, constantly behind schedule and taking it as a failing, you blame yourself for any setbacks, and take on more responsibility to compensate, working even longer and harder to play eternal catch-up while falling further behind, compounding the cycle while becoming harder to reach in your dwindling life away from work.
Yet given the impossibly high standards that you set for yourself, you also hold others to them—all the while knowing that it’s wrong to be directly judgmental and better to appear patient and grateful. Trapped, you inflict on yourself a mighty self-discipline in order not to snap when others don’t meet your standards, and risk becoming inhibited and therefore even more self-reproachful for not being able to state your expectations plainly until things get out of hand. For all your intelligence, energy, originality, strength of character, and overt cheerfulness, you risk becoming a black hole of self-defeating negativity.
That pessimism is of vast philosophical value if your chosen field is artistic, but no matter what your field is this pessimism will also cost you greatly in the practical, interpersonal, business side of whatever you’re doing—and, if what you do is business, you’re on an upward flight toward an Icarus-like disaster.
The psychological portraiture on which “The Intern” is based—that of an extraordinarily capable young woman named Jules (Anne Hathaway) who has taken an Internet startup from zero to major in eighteen months but is in danger of being pushed out of the top slot in the firm—is sharply drawn from life, albeit sweetened and shaded. It’s not a whole picture of an inner landscape but the details that it reproduces are uncompromisingly clear and precise.
But the movie is also an unromantic comedy, a bourgeois fantasy for those who’d recognize themselves, or a dream version of themselves, in the character of Jules, in which something better and more decisive than a therapist comes in to break the cycle of virtuous self-punishment—a fairy godfather, in the person of Robert De Niro, who plays Ben, a retired businessman and lonely widower who arrives at Jules’s firm in its first batch of “senior interns.”
“The Intern” seems backward-constructed, on the basis of Jules’s problems, at work and with her husband, Matt (Anders Holm), who gave up his own job to stay at home with their young daughter, Paige (JoJo Kushner), but is beginning to chafe at this arrangement. Jules is under pressure from investors to accept an outside C.E.O. who’d become her boss. She’s sufficiently self-critical at work to believe that she could benefit from the corporate equivalent of adult supervision; and she’s sufficiently self-critical at home to think that relief from the pressure of a demanding job might improve her marriage. At this crossroads, Ben arrives to help Jules face these problems—and the character of Ben, and the illusions that Meyers creates him with, are the irresistible aspects of the fantasy that Meyers is selling.
Ben willingly accepts being called old-school. He wears a suit to work, claiming it’s how he feels comfortable; he carries a fabric handkerchief (and offers a quaintly chivalrous reason for doing so); he uses a forty-year-old leather attaché case; he shaves, he admits, even on weekends. Ben worked for the same company—one that compiled and manufactured telephone directories—for forty years (he was a marketing executive). He was married to the same woman for forty-six years, until her death, and was, he says, blissfully happy with her.
Fidelity, devotion, discretion, a sense of tacit virtue, unyielding principle, and conspicuous reserve—Ben is the apotheosis of conventional liberal morality, a firm grid of values that he applies to himself without daring to impose on others. He is a walking touchstone, measuring no one himself (or, rather, measuring all silently and implicitly) but there to serve for others as a measure that they can apply. He offers no wisdom but is filled with it and is waiting to be tapped.
Ben is a caricature of a good man of the sort who used to be caricatured in movies. In the films of the less sanctimonious classic directors, he’d have been played by Ralph Bellamy, because there has to be something wrong with anyone who’s so good. Jules, praising Ben in the presence of three scruffy young male colleagues, muses—“How in one generation have men gone from guys like Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford to …”—as she gazes ruefully at the younger men’s disheveled tenue.
Jack Nicholson fucked around royally in his salad days, according to Anjelica Huston, and it made her miserable. You’d think that Meyers, who has been in Hollywood long enough, would know better about stars of the golden seventies, whose character and styles were forged before the Age of Aquarius—and about the recklessly hedonistic fires with which they burned, and sometimes burned out. Women, too, often did the same. But what Jules needs—and what Meyers provides for her—is a man who, unthreateningly, unambiguously, unselfishly bears the wisdom of that experience without its guilt, who fought the wars not as they were on the ground but as they were depicted in the press releases—or in the movies—in the pre-Aquarian movies of unequivocal public virtue. Ben is a boomer in the garb of the Greatest Generation.
The noodle-boys with whom Jules grows exasperated seem, above all, undefined. They are firm neither in principle nor in self-definition, curious and tolerant and heuristically malleable but lacking a clear identity that allows them to take decisive action at all. They do not dare to eat a peach. They seem untested by any wars, both literal and metaphorical. Expecting little fidelity, they offer little. They bring an unchannelled curiosity, a curated range of skills, and a charming doubt of all identities, including their own, which they keep in quotation marks—and, as such, they are at the prow of progress.
But Jules has crossed the line. By putting her naturally orderly character into action, she is, in effect, tainted—preternaturally clean in moral bearing and crisp couture, but soiled with the demands of power. That’s where, in the movie’s view, she runs afoul of the tones and undertones of her generation.
The crucial fantasy of “The Intern” isn’t the emotional bond between the generations but the reconciliation and constructive unity of two conflicting business styles—the lifelong company man and the disruptive entrepreneurial free spirit. Meyers, herself the insider’s insider, puts the moral, emotional, and social tools for a serious young woman’s continued success—the lessons in independence and, not incidentally, in feminism that Jules needs—in the mouth of the man in the gray flannel suit.
Fantasy has a way of casting a lurid light on unbearable realities. Today and tomorrow, in its Vittorio De Sica retrospective, Film Forum will be screening “Miracle in Milan,” from 1951, in which Italy’s crises of employment and housing are portrayed in a sentimental comedy about an orphan who makes his way to a shanty town on the outskirts of the city. When its residents face eviction, the newcomer is endowed with magical powers and comes to their rescue. The specifics are worth experiencing for yourself; the over-all idea, though, is clear enough from the mere description—in a crisis of such systematic causes, only a miracle can save the poorest and most vulnerable. In one of his most exuberant comedies, De Sica sounds the howling depths of despair.
Similarly, in “The Intern,” a warm-hearted comedy that seems calibrated to the stitch to gratify viewers of all generations who wouldn’t use the word “bourgeois” unironically, Meyers nonetheless appears to outline, by means of blithe fantasy, what strikes her as a crisis—one that, she suggests, particularly affects the most capable young women. It’s not the obvious conflict of work and life, which vanishes with a wave of Ben’s virtual magic wand. It’s a crisis of autonomy and authority, and it’s the modern sociopolitical version of a very old-fashioned problem: wanting to be liked. What Ben can best do for Jules is to help her lose her inhibition about exercising power, about running her company like its visionary founder and not seeking permission to do so. This crisis, the movie suggests, goes beyond the personal to the over-all notion of progress and its conflict with power. For all the bounties that Ben seems equipped to deliver, Meyers is clear that Jules cannot have it all—and about what gets sacrificed in the tradeoff, namely, ideals. Jules will have to get used to the idea of looking and even acting like one of the suits; and that, in Meyers’s view, is a crucial kind of progress. The happy ending, or new beginning, looming just beyond the actual end of the movie would be Jules’s I.P.O.
