The Intern

On the surface, the concept at the heart of The Intern seems like a sensible experiment — hiring retirees as interns at trendy high-tech firms for their old-fashioned business expertise.

Yet such an idea also seems implausible in today’s corporate environment, and that’s something to which this workplace comedy seems completely oblivious, even if its heart might occasionally be in the right place.

So we’re left with an idealistic and self-indulgent slice of feminist schmaltz from director Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give) that generates some scattered laughs but little substance with regard to gender roles or office politics.

Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway) runs a highly successful and rapidly growing online fashion company from a refurbished New York factory, and it has all the quirky characteristics of a hip startup firm that was started by someone barely out of college.

Enter Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro), a retired executive from a bygone era who’s looking for ways to stay busy following his wife’s death. So he joins the new senior intern program at Jules’ company and winds up working directly with the boss herself.

After dismissing Ben at first for being out of touch, Jules warms up to his dedication and versatility, and eventually relies on him as a confidant both professionally and in her personal life, yielding his advice on balancing work demands and spending time with her stay-at-home husband (Anders Holm) and young daughter.

The two stars have fun with the material and manage to develop a decent chemistry within the confines of a script that’s lacking much depth or conflict. Any flaws that either of the main characters possess is explained by citing external circumstances, such as Ben’s lingering grief about his wife or Jules’ pressure to prove herself as a female executive. The primary conflict that drives the third act feels contrived and tacked-on.

It’s assembled into a slick and crowd-pleasing package, although the film’s safe predictability — and its stale jokes about Ben’s clueless approach to laptops and cell phones — undermines its efforts to promote the idea that seniors can be valuable contributors in a contemporary business climate that tends to push them away.

Such messages are given a half-hearted push by Meyers, whose idealistic film squanders its potential for edgy satire in favor of cheap sentimentality.

Rated PG-13, 121 minutes.