The Intern

The Intern produce by Nancy Meyers  is the story of Bill Whittaker (Robert De Niro) who comes to a crossroad in his life after several years of retirement. Instead of the enjoying the freedom of traveling and having an unstructured routine he decides to return to the work place and take on the position as a senior intern at an online fashion site. Understanding that there was no direct path for his position in interning for the CEO and founder of the company, Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway), who by everyone's account, is challenging. In order to feel useful in his bleak position with the unavailable boss, Mr. Whittaker finds himself  amusing his young co-workers with his work ethics, his personalities, his dress for success "style", his experience and worldly knowledge. Jules is not easily to impress. She is not impressed about having interns in her company especially one who had been assigned to shadow her. She knows hard work, long hours, and great customer services is needed to get the job done. He sees her skills, knowledge, and her business “no-sense attitude”, he quickly senses that Jules is not interested in having an intern shadow her, especially one at his age. With this realization, he will abide his time with her. He begin to analyze each department and start assisting the employees out, to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Although Jules is married with a beautiful daughter, she is also married to her booming business. She finds herself in a situation, based on her consultant's recommendations, to interview and hire someone as CEO with more years of experiences and that can take her business to the next level without the pitfalls that comes with the quick success. But it also means that she will step down from her position as CEO. That tough decision comes in the form of saving her marriage and keeping her family together. Soon Jules realizes that the intern she kept avoiding, ends up turning the table to help her. She gradually warms up to the idea that having a senior intern working directly with her is not such a bad idea. She soon finds ways to utilizing his service that extends beyond the normal working relations. His sense of warm, charming, patience, wisdom and humor helps her to develop a great friendship with him. She realizes that no family is perfect and that there are women out there that have successful businesses and maintain a happy home. In a turn of events, she learns that Bill is a great person and he helps her to find a balance in the two and even help save her marriage.

Although, the movie was a bit unconventional it was a warm, funny and romantic but a bit unrealistic in the fact that, it is not clear what the online fashion business was about, the audience did not have a clue and was left wondering how the business world from Jules’ prospective.  Then secondly, no matter what the friendship becomes between boss and intern there are certain lines that are not crossed in a business friendship/relationship, especially when they were in the hotel room together. There was also the situation where Jules easily forgave her husband after he leaves the other woman when it was clearly infidelity in the marriage.  The balance between young boss and the older employee seem to fit this movie. This movie was warm and inviting and not boring as previously assumed. I would definitely recommend this movie to all ages group.
(Review by Dr. Dwanna-Ary)