Film: Jessica Kellgren-Hayes

In The Intern, released this Friday, Robert De Niro plays a 70-year-old widower who has discovered that retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! Searching for a way back into the workplace he grabs an opportunity to become a ‘senior intern’ at an online fashion site. Yes, the ‘senior intern’ joke is likely to be repeated often, if the trailer is anything to go on!
It isn’t really explained by Anne Hathaway’s high-powered fashion entrepreneur decided to hire a retiree as her intern, but from the trailer it looks to be a heart-warming experience. We would expect nothing less from writer/producer/director Nancy Meyer, famous for such feel good films as Father of the Bride, The Parent Trap, What Women Want and The Holiday. The interiors have her trademark glow, the cast are all rosy cheeked and there are a couple of good-natured jabs at the ‘hip’ group of the moment (this time it’s millennials and our excessive use of emoticons).
In other words, it looks to be a film I will deeply enjoy: light, fluffy, heart-warming, I’ll probably cry at some point… there is just one issue. That issue, although on paper it is a strange thing to say, is the multi-Oscar-winning male lead.

Robert De Niro is a master of self-parody, both the deliberate and the unintentional. Since 1999’s Analyze This, in which he played a gangster who, because of panic attacks brought about by occupational stress starts therapy sessions, De Niro has been milking his famed ‘tough guy’ persona by referencing his past works. Actively riffing on the more meta identity of an actor isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Analyze This was itself a good film – but self-mockery has led to an era of pale De Niro performances. No longer does this method actor play a character, now he plays ‘renowned tough guy Robert De Niro’ playing a character!
We have seen such performances in the Meet The Parents franchise, City by the Sea, Machete, the awful Eddie Murphy buddy movie Showtime, Godsend and even animated spoofs of past characters in Shark Tale and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Where Analyze This was a pitch-perfect pinprick to his own storied career, with De Niro wielding his trademark squinty-eyed, Italian-accented menace for laughs, these other films insult his past.
Other iconic actors have also come to rely on their routine schtick (Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t anything but schtick!) as Red and The Expendables proved for action stars. After The Shining, Jack Nicholson’s favourite role was “Jack Nicholson”, in all of his eyebrow-raising, sly-grinning, slightly unhinged glory. Marlon Brando also painfully started slumming at the tail-end of his career, intentionally satirizing The Godfather’s Don Corleone for audiences who couldn’t remember his early great work.

Tune in to MovieLine on Wednesday for our review of The Intern and – fingers crossed! – hopefully no Robert De Niro put downs!
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