Last night I watched The Intern on television and decided to write about it because the story seems relevant to our time, the characters are attractive and the humor gentle, it has several nice subplots, and with one exception, never annoyed me. Robert De Niro plays Ben Wittaker, a 70 year old retired business manager working as an intern in a website business. Anne Hathaway plays Jules Ostin, his boss. Quoting a reviewer, here, “In Intern, She’s the Boss, but He’s the Star.” De Niro is masterful in the role, Hathaway is convincing and the young actors surrounding them are charming. Here and here for reviews.
The current meaning of “intern” is new to me. I’ve always pictured an intern as a recently qualified doctor in a hospital, fresh out of medical school, doing a year’s training in a medical specialty. Interns worked long, grueling, punishing hours for low pay, and hospitals depended upon them for cheap labor. For many years, movies and television dramas about doctors in hospital internships were popular with the public. I discussed one such movie here.
Now the internship is defined as job training for white collar and professional careers. From a study I did in rural Turkey, 1968 to ’72, I became familiar with traditional apprenticeships for trade and vocational jobs, the original internships. The boy in the photograph here is in an apprenticeship, as were boys in the butcher shop shown, and a boy in the photo of a furniture workshop in another essay on our apartment in Ankara. In the central Anatolian town Hasan and I studied, described here and in other posts, we observed boys working as apprentices, on the way to becoming a master, Usta, in various traditional crafts, such as blacksmith. Usta is a title of respect, like Bey (or Doctor) for a professional or learned man. In the mid-1970s, doing an M.B.A. in the Kellogg School (in my mid-40s), between the two years most of us did a summer management internship that was not directly related to future employment. (Mine was in the American Hospital in Paris, unpaid.) The current internship is a new institution. In my generation, at least in the early years, the tradition still existed of a business/industry doing its own training of the management staff and of its skilled laborers. Then came the vocational schools, the M.B.A., the professional Master’s degree preparing people for the job market. And now we have the intern as cheap, or free, labor while learning on the job, not too different from the apprentice, except the apprenticeship was more personal and the young person’s future was far more secure.
The movie begins with showing why Ben wants the intern job; it is a way out of the boredom that has overtaken him. He’s a widower whose children and grandchildren live too far away for him to be involved in their lives. He is in good health, has a good income, still lives in his proper bourgeois home, has many acquaintances, if not exactly friends, and is part of an upper middle class neighborhood. He knows this area of Brooklyn, even the building in which he will be an intern. Midway through the movie a romantic interest for him, a woman of about sixty, is introduced. It annoyed me that the two women his age are both made to look foolish and unattractive.
In Jules we see a frantically busy entrepreneur running a business she loves, engaged in its every detail and on good, if not close relationships with her employees. We also see her aid-de-camp informing her that the company’s investors want her to step aside, to bring in a qualified CEO to manage the company more efficiently, and they have a number of men prepared to take over for her. Granted that she did create and build a very profitable business in eighteen months from nothing to hundreds of employees, she really is in over her head, isn’t she? So, all she needs to do now is interview the CEO candidates and select the one she prefers. In the meantime, as Jules struggles with this, she and her husband, who is a stay-at-home Dad to their adorable daughter, are having troubles.
Ben is tactful and observant. He becomes everyone’s friend, an advisor to the young men in matters of romance, and a helper with several management problems. His experience is useful, even in this world of changed technology, more casual dress and manners for young men, key positions held by young women, and certainly less hierarchy. He soon finds himself in a position to be Jules’ constant source of support, and they become friends. He respects both her and her business acumen.
This is an agreeably done story of an older person finding meaning in life by being involved with and helping younger people, of a modern woman succeeding in the business world if the man in her life accepts a blurring of traditional roles, and of friendship between generations. To think reasonably about it overall I had to check and set aside my thoughts on social reality and what someone with my background and frame of mind would have done in Ben’s situation.
The movie is set in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and part of the story is the setting — scenes of building facades and interiors, of the streets and of the parks where children play. The brownstone row houses are handsome.
I would like to have seen more of the public buildings, the way we saw more of Manhattan and Harlem in Jungle Fever, the movie I discussed here, and wished a useful map of New York City and its boroughs were included.
Azad, my adopted son, watched the movie with me and was surprised by the gentrification of Park Slope. In the 1980s he had gone into the area to look for a place to live but found it too crime ridden for his comfort. An image that stays with him is of a car on a main street sitting on bricks, its tires and everything detachable long gone. People in the neighborhood were poor, older White working class, like the Irish and Italian, and equally poor Black and Latino people, all of whom had moved in as middle-class White families fled to the suburbs. Finally, Azad rented an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, near the IRT subway stop, not far from the great St. George Hotel.
A notable feature of The Intern is that, except for one woman, everyone in the workplace and in Ben’s neighborhood are standard European-descent White. In most movies and on TV these days, a more realistic ethnic and racial diversity is shown, at least among the extras. Since Ben had worked for forty years in a top managerial position in the remodeled building of his internship, he surely would have known a more mixed demographic as workers, more like the minority group women we see when Jules goes to the factory floor to show workers how to box items for shipping. Think of how Ben might have broken his boredom by volunteering to teach in a vocational school, showing less privileged young people learning technical job skills how to development the management skills also needed for moving up the career ladder. That sort of engagement would have been truly rewarding, but such recipients of his good will were not part of his personal community, of his reference group, and probably invisible to a man like Ben. Oh well. At least the movie doesn’t stereotype minority group people; it just pretends they don’t exist.
Azad often chose to walk across the historic, magnificent Brooklyn Bridge to reach the Manhattan office where he worked. How I would have loved to walk on the bridge, to have had that experience.
Thanks for the review. Wish I could watch it. Dan used to bicycle across the Brooklyn bridge to get to his job at The Guardian from his apartment in Brooklyn. I love how you are able to reference earlier writing and pictures in the text.
If your son lived in Brooklyn and bicycled on the great bridge, you must have visited him there, as I visited my son. How I wish I had known more of New York. I suspect you will be able to find The Intern sometime on late night TV. That’s how I watched it. I write about movies that are easily accessible and worth one’s time to see and think about. It’s good to live briefly in that place, with those people, seeing that architecture and later find out more about them on the internet. I also like reading the reviews and maybe arguing with the reviewers, even if it’s a silent, one-way exercise.
If you watch the movie, let me know what you think of it. Your comments are always interesting.
Iris – I just finished reading this splendid review and also the one of LaLa Land. We are on the same page with the latter movie. I did like The Intern perhaps this is because of transitioning to a new place in one’s life. I loved how you sketched out the evolution of the term ‘intern’. Also I agree with Jane that your movie posts or blogs are extremely rich in social and cultural history. I just saw The Salesman – an Iranian movie. It was brilliant and very touching. I hope you get a chance to see it because I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Looking forward to your next blog.