Movie Review: The Intern (2015)

Last week, while on break, I walked into the room and started watching TV and I came across this movie called The Intern. I had briefly heard about it but had not known anything else about it, hadn’t even seen the movie trailer. Honestly it was a really excellent movie, and it has a really heartfelt message. It is about a 70 year old widower named Ben Whitaker who lives in New York City and is happily retired but who is trying to find his purpose in life. He has tried everything: learning Mandarin, taking classes, doing tai-chi, but he is still wondering what else to do. While walking down the street he sees a flier advertising an internship program at a fashion agency for people 65 years of age and older. He decides to send in his application, which is a video cover letter (because as the ad says, traditional cover letters are so old school) and he gets an interview for the job. When Ben gets the job, he is assigned to the owner of the company, Jules Ostin (played brilliantly by Anne Hathaway, who was in another workplace comedy-drama called The Devil Wears Prada, only she was the assistant to a mean boss.) Jules is not great with elderly people and she is also super swamped with trying to run the company and also manage her family life. Ben is eager to start working immediately, and they assign him to work directly under Jules. However, Jules is not excited about working with Ben and doesn’t give him any work to do even when she tells him she will email him work to do. However, what this movie showed me is that when you are not given anything to do, sometimes you need to take the initiative yourself, and when you take the initiative you gain people’s trust. Ben shows that he is willing to put in the work, and one crucial thing he does on the job during his first few weeks is help one of the employees roll a cart of stuff through the office since she is having trouble rolling it. When Jules sees him humbly doing this for the employee, she takes note but she also still doesn’t give him much to do. However, when she arrives to work one morning she finds that this big pile of papers, junk and other stuff that was just lying in an area of the office is magically gone, and the desk where people dumped the stuff is suddenly neat. Jules wonders who did it, and her other coworkers tell her that Ben arrived early in the morning to organize the desk. Ben in his personal life is also a very organized person. He keeps his suits, his pants, his ties and his undergarments very well organized. (I was getting serious Marie Kondo vibes, and all I could think was, I need to do a serious Ben Whittaker/ Marie Kondo cleanup of my room.) They ring a bell every time something good happens at the company (getting a record number of Instagram likes, etc.) and someone rings the bell and announces Ben cleared the desk, and everyone claps and cheers. Ben is appreciative, but he is also humble, and I think I learned from Ben to always have that humble spirit and keep making sincere efforts to try and do good work even if you think people don’t see it. I think it’s a good lesson for me to learn because it’s easy for me to feel like I’m not being recognized or that my work doesn’t matter, but when people remind me how important my work is, I feel good. But I’ve also learned I need to also take ownership of my work as well and I think doing this has helped me gain more confidence in myself when I recognize that I am doing my best each day. It hasn’t been easy to do this but it is something I am still working on.

When Jules sees Ben is truly making a sincere effort in the workplace, she finds he is also helpful in many other areas of her life as well. One day she gets soy sauce on her suit jacket, and Becky, her very stressed and burned out assistant, alerts him to it. He humbly takes the jacket to get cleaned, and then he finds out of the corner of his eye when looking out the window that Jules’ personal driver is drinking alcohol before he is scheduled to drive Jules. Jules is about to go down to meet the driver, but Ben goes down to talk to the driver and he politely tells the driver that it would not be safe for him to drive Jules after he has been drinking alcohol, and he should just tell Jules he needs to call out for the day since he doesn’t feel well. The driver listens to him, and Jules lets Ben drive her to her destination. She ends up letting Ben drive her the rest of the time, and they end up developing a very special bond. However, Jules is not comfortable with this at first. She is always working and never makes time for herself, even to spend time with her husband, Matt, and young daughter, Paige. Matt is a stay at home dad who spends a lot of time with Paige, but he never gets to spend time with his wife because she is working all the time. Something about Ben makes her feel calm because he always puts her at ease with his calm presence. He never fusses nor complains about how stressed he is. He shows up and does his job, and she realizes that is all she wants is someone who can show up and take the initiative to get the job done. Without Ben knowing she orders Ben to be transferred to another department because she is suspicious about his intentions, and she doesn’t think people will take her seriously, but one day she gets in the car and finds another intern, not Ben, is driving her (the lady ends up almost crashing into a car and Jules ends up driving herself) and she goes into the office and Cameron, her VP, informs her that like she emailed, her request to transfer Ben was completed. She rushes over to a coffee shop, where she finds Ben getting coffees to take back to the office, and she apologizes and tells him that she is not used to being around someone with Ben’s calm centered down to earth personality, and she could really use his help. Ben doesn’t give her a hard time, and tells her he would be happy to work for her again. She regains his trust and this helps in much deeper situations, namely when Ben finds out that Matt is cheating on Jules. Jules reveals later to Ben that she knew he was cheating and she is fearful that if she leaves Matt she will end up alone. She is holding out hope for them to stay together, but Ben is very honest with her and tells her she needs to do what makes her happy. Jules is on a trip in San Francisco to meet with a CEO because Cameron is telling her she is doing too much, and it would help to have someone else run the company. However, this is a frightening prospect to Jules because this company is Jules’ baby. She nurtured it from start to finish, and she feels she needs to handle everything rather than ask for help in hopes of keeping the company running. However, Ben is teaching her that she needs to ask for help and that asking for help is not a sign of weakness. When Jules learns this, she learns that some other people on the team also need help as well, in particular her assistant, Becky, who is swamped with work and works 12 hours a day under all these high stress situations. Jules never acknowledged how hard Becky was working, but then Ben shows her that to keep people feeling okay about working somewhere, you need to make them feel appreciated and valued and respected. Becky has a business degree and has a valuable skillset but Jules up until then never acknowledged it, until Ben tells Jules that Becky has so much potential, especially because she helped him on a project that Jules needed help on.

The movie doesn’t talk too heavily about grief, but it is significant that the main character is a widower. He also goes to a lot of funerals. Even though I am still young, I have attended many memorial services and funerals for many of my older friends who have passed away. I am not going to lie, grief is very painful. After one of my friends passed away in April, I really didn’t know how I was going to go on with my life. She was truly a treasure and for a 20-something who was depressed and suicidal at the time, she really gave me hope that life had a great purpose and that I could become happy even when I was going through painful difficulties. I didn’t have to wait until later in life to become happy. Losing a lot of the older members in my Buddhist community has been a serious journey of healing and learning to heal from loss, but I can look back with appreciation for all of the memories I shared with my friends in the community. They really showed me that life itself is a source of joy and that I have a lot more to be thankful for than I think I do. I think studying about life and death from a Buddhist perspective has helped me create meaning from life even when I felt it was no longer worth living at times because I was going through so much painful suffering. And I think seeing the vibrant lives of so many of the older members of my Buddhist community reminded me that the pain, heartbreak, disappointment, anxiety and other stuff I was going through in my 20s was not forever, and that there was hope for me. It also showed me that it helps to have a purpose in life and meaningful relationships with people in the process of healing from loss. Ben meets a wonderful woman named Fiona, who is a masseuse at his workplace. They strike up a conversation and they end up dating and falling in love. She, like him, is an older woman and they develop a meaningful bond with each other. Ben also develops a meaningful friendship with Jules, and teaches her a lot of life lessons. He also learns from her with so much humility and grace, and even when she has to make the difficult decision about whether to move to San Francisco or not in order to leave Matt, Ben fully supports Jules in her decision because he wants her to be happy, and when he reminds Matt of this one night, Matt self-reflects and realizes what he did was wrong, and it takes a lot of courage for him to confront Jules about his cheating and tell her that he will do better.

I need to get some sleep but 0verall, this was an excellent movie. I really recommend watching it. There are also some funny moments as well, like when Ben and his coworkers have to break into Jules’ mom’s house and delete a nasty email Jules accidentally sent to her mom. The scene where Adam Devine’s character is jamming to Busta Rhymes in the car was hilarious! Overall, excellent movie.

Author: The Arts Are Life

I am a writer and musician. Lover of music, movies, books, art, and nature. View all posts by The Arts Are Life