In The Intern (2015), director-writer Nancy Meyers creates a female character, Jules, who has it all.  Or she nearly does.  At the same time, Meyers has fashioned two of the kind of male characters she will value and cherish for the rest of her life: i.e., men who are enlightened about women and their jobs.  One of the problems with the film is that one of these men, Ben (Robert De Niro—Jules’s intern), is a paragon of righteousness, having no faults to speak of.  This is not quite the case with the other man, a stay-at-home dad to whom Jules is married.  And yet . . .

The Intern is not the most realistic feminist pic you could see, and, what’s more, it’s pretty bumpy—“clumsy” (Joe Morgenstern).  Truth to tell, it’s a failure, but an interesting one in which we get to see a well-grounded and sensitive performance by Anne Hathaway as Jules, in addition to Meyers’s curious imagination.  Alas, there is an immature, unfunny shlub too (Zack Pearlman’s Davis)—here because every American comedy-drama has to have one.