De Niro’s Intern gets the job done
The Intern (12A) Verdict: Affable role-reversal drama
The Walk (PG) Verdict: Wobbly NANCY MEYERS, the writerdirector whose romantic comedies i nclude The Holiday (2006) and It’s Complicated (2009), has now poured her energies into The Intern, starring Robert De Niro as Ben, a kindly widower who tries numerous ways of filling his retirement, eventually finding fulfilment only by going back to work, as a ‘senior intern’ at an online fashion company founded and run by t he dynamic but oddly scatty Jules (Anne Hathaway).
Unpredictability has never been a Meyers virtue, and nor is it here, the narrative practically following a diagram as Jules overcomes her initial misgivings about Ben, warming to him and coming to rely on him.
Meanwhile, he forges a relationship with the company masseuse (Rene Russo), whose presence in the film really serves only one major purpose — to shoot down the ghastly thought that Ben and Jules might become romantically entwined.
The Intern bowls along amiably enough, carried almost entirely by De Niro, in one of those smiley, twinkly turns of his, and the likeable Hathaway.
When it strains too hard for laughs, as in a daft ‘burglary’ scene, it falls flat on its face. And never did the cut-throat world of fashion look quite so unthreatening in the windpipe department. Jules occasionally fails to acknowledge her assistant, and that’s about the extent of her bitchiness. The Devil Wears Prada this ain’t. It’s not even The Codger Wears Prada.
Yet, for all its shortcomings, I quite enjoyed The Intern. De Niro and Hathaway have an easy rapport, and Meyers, while a long way short of top form, knows how to spin a couple of hours into something perfectly, irreproachably watchable.
THE WALK is a very different proposition, a 3D dramatisation of Frenchman Philippe Petit’s extraordinary 1974 wire-walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre t hat ought t o be riveting, yet dashes expectations again and again.
The director i s Robert Zemeckis, who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump and showed all those years ago with Who framed Roger Rabbit and Back To The Future that he really knows how to dish up a visual treat. Here, though, he almost seems to be walking a tightrope himself, and rather less surely than the fearless Petit, whose most famous escapade was chronicled far more memorably in the brilliant 2008 documentary Man On Wire.
It’s good to see the Twin Towers as a symbol of ingenuity, rather than inhumanity, but Zemeckis’s major error is in trying, cackhandedly, to turn the story into a knockabout comedy. Even the soundtrack evokes a Sixties caper movie, and while Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks the part of Petit, his mugging to camera (much of it from the top of the Statue of Liberty) rapidly becomes tiresome.
There’s also something about the ’ Allo ’Allo- style French accents that makes everyone, including Ben Kingsley in the role of Petit’s circus-patriarch mentor, sound like a ham.
The walk itself, however, when eventually it comes, is worth waiting for. And it just about justifies the decision to use 3D, which so often cheapens rather than enhances a film, and does so here right up to the final act, when Zemeckis — and Gordon-Levitt, mercifully — at last get the balance just right.