Nancy Meyers' most recently helmed vehicle, 2015's "The Intern" once again shows that she is out of touch with society and unable to make a movie that doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator. This cliche fish-out-of water story is just the same lame joke flopping around repeatedly wishing it could swim.
And although this movie is set in modern-day Brooklyn, it pretends like the idea of an Internet company that sells clothes is something new, and it populates its cast of only white characters with people who have incredibly backward ideas about working women and men staying home to raise the kids.
Anne Hathaway plays Jules Ostin, the ultra-hands-on founder and CEO of a fast-growing fashion startup called About the Fit. She is overworked and struggling with deciding whether to hire a CEO to replace her so she can keep her stay-at-home dad of a husband happy. The idea of delegating tasks and hiring a nanny never occurred to these billionaires.
Robert De Niro plays Ben Whittaker, a 70-year-old widower who starts to work as an intern at Hathaway's startup company. He is a two-dimensional, sickly sweet character who we feel is actually a weasel in sheep's clothing, because he takes every opportunity to brown-nose Hathaway in order to move up in the company and into her life.
Rene Russo plays the company's in-house massage therapist, but she seems more like an in-house prostitute with the overly-sexualized massages she is constantly giving De Niro, who she of course fall in love with, because they're both not young and near each other.
Andrew Rannells plays Hathaway's right-hand man at the company who appears to actually call all the shots weirdly, because he secretly has meetings with the board without Hathaway being there and is the one who forces her to take on an intern to shadow her. But really Nancy Meyers just wanted her main character to have a gay best friend underling, so it doesn’t matter that his job makes no sense.
And two-thirds of the "Workaholics" main cast are also in this movie—Adam DeVine as a sexually-harassing co-worker of De Niro's, and Anders Holm as Hathaway's unhappy and unfaithful stay-at-home dad husband. Poor Blake.
Join us as we dive into Nancy Meyers' bizarre psyche once again, wonder why she equates carrying a handkerchief with being a "real man," and if she actually is the feminist she so claims to be.
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