De Niro, Hathaway charm saves 'The Intern' from terminal cuteness

My best guess would be that Nancy Meyers couldn't get Morgan Freeman to star in her treacly comedy "The Intern," so she cast Robert De Niro as the white version of the patented "wise old mentor with a heart of gold" character.

De Niro plays Ben, a 70-year-old widower retired after 40 years of publishing telephone books in Brooklyn. He spots an ad for a "senior internship" at an online fashion company About the Fit.

In his video interview, Ben talks about how lonely he is. "There's a hole in my life, and I need to fill it. Soon!"

Apparently, that's just the business pitch the company COO Cameron (Andrew Rannells) is looking for. He hires Ben and assigns him to the founder and creative force behind the Fit, Jules Ostin (Anne Hathway), a hyper busy woman who pedals a bike around her office, forcing her assistant Becky (Christina Scherer) to breathlessly run behind, spouting the scheduled events she's late for.

Ben's calm demeanor, unflappable attitude, mature outlook and willingness to learn all about those newfangled things - Facebook and Twitter - make him a hit with the office. Not so with Jules, who asks for him to be transferred to another department for being "too observant."

Ben observes that Jules is a mess, a frazzled woman attempting to be a diligent boss, plus a good mother to her precocious daughter Paige (JoJo Kushner) and good wife for her stay-at-home hubby, Matt (Anders Holm), who could pass for Nick Offerman's younger brother.

Her company has grown so fast that she can't keep up, so Jules reluctantly decides to hire a new executive to take over for her. The search for her replacement only adds more stress to her already stripped-electrical-wire lifestyle.

Only one man can save her. The insightfully wise, perpetually patient and stubbornly strong Morgan Freeman. Wait! I mean Ben, who should have been played by Freeman, but from what I can tell in "The Intern," there aren't that many black people employed at About the Fit or in surrounding Brooklyn.

It doesn't take long before Ben becomes a father figure to the immature millennials working under Jules, among them the kidlike Davis (Zack Pearlman), intern manager Jason (Adam Devine) and Internet techie Lewis (Jason Orley). Then, even Jules falls for his paternal vibes, and the charm between Hathaway and De Niro takes the stage.

"The Intern" could have been a tight, funny, lickety-split 85-minute comedy, but Meyers stretches it for more than two hours, with punchy interchanges and a few solid laughs drowning under a tidal wave of terminal cuteness.

Jules is cute. Her daughter is cuter. But Ben is the cutest, with De Niro's face constantly wincing, blinking, shaking, rolling and mugging at Def-Con 4 levels.

Theodore Shapiro's sugary score constantly attacks our central nervous systems, pushing every musically cued button to engage our sentiment and sympathy.

But that's about it. Writer/director Meyers - who gave us "Something's Gotta Give" and "It's Complicated" - offers no villains, no sense of true conflict to overcome save for Jules' inner anguish over the decisions she must make. A surprise complication late in the movie is resolved so quickly (a three-minute speech?) that it hardly registers as a serious problem.

De Niro's Ben remains the same, rock-steady, benignly lovable dad figure, who never really changes from the beginning, except the hole in his heart gets filled by the sassy and sexy office masseuse, a throwaway role given zest and dimension by Rene Russo.

The riskiest, most spontaneous scene in "The Intern" involves Ben and the office guys staging an impromptu burglary of Jules' mother's house to erase a damaging email accidentally sent to her computer.

The scene doesn't have much to do with the rest of the movie. But for a few minutes, we're lifted out of Meyers' quicksand of sentiment and cuteness, and her movie breathes.

“The Intern”

★ ★

Starring: Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Renee Russo, Adam Devine, Zack Pearlman, Nat Wolff

Directed by: Nancy Meyers

Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for language, suggestive situations. 121 minutes