by Fin Wheeler

There was lots of buzz and hype surrounding the recent release of The Intern, written and directed by Nancy Meyers. De Niro plays a 70-year-old retired widow opposite Hathaway as a young, married mother whose business has become a massive success in the past eighteen months.

Everyone loves De Niro, Hathaway has been an American Sweetheart since her Princess Mia days and Nancy Meyer movies are always crowd-pleasers. The press was interested to see these A-listers in age-appropriate roles. Roles that actually address the real problems and concerns these people, and people their age, face in real-life.

So why have the reviews for the movie been so average?

The movie’s been out less than a month and has already taken $134.6 million against a budget of $40 million. Despite this some critics have called it a comedy that just doesn’t have enough laughs.

Others say it’s a timely premise but still somehow misses the mark. Such comments led Clem Barstow of The Guardian to suggest that the reviews would have been more positive if the reviewers weren’t all male.

Perhaps. But I think there’s more to it than that.

The Rise of the Actor

Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was the studios who controlled what stories were developed and which actors got cast in which types of roles.

Typically, actors would start their apprenticeship as extras or in the chorus in stage shows, work up to bit parts. After a few minor roles, when the studio was sure of their appeal and how to market them, the actor would be given a certain ‘type’ to play in production after production for as long as they continued to draw audiences.

If the latest picture starred John Wayne or Marilyn Monroe, you didn’t need to know the synopsis, you knew what you’d get. The range of characters an actor could portray on screen was limited.

Politics brought about the collapse of the studio system and directors stepped in, rising to become the chief creative voice of each project for the next few decades. While screenwriters of this time were encouraged to create more diverse roles, the focus was still on writing for the standard stock ‘types.’

The scripts getting greenlit were still almost all about the young male protagonist who beats the odds (played by a well-known actor at least a decade older than the character they‘re portraying).

Skip to present day. Pretty much every A-list actor owns their own production company. They choose what properties they buy and develop. No longer do actors have to play the same one stock role over and over for their whole career. To a much greater extent than ever before, actors are able to control what sort of characters they play.

Much as I love Marilyn Monroe’s films, she must have been so frustrated by the tedium of playing yet another brainless sex-bomb. In contrast, Jennifer Laurence, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock and Angelina Jolie each constantly challenge themselves with a spectrum of roles.

So now that actors have so much autonomy, how are we screenwriters to write for them?

Roles that Reflect Real Life

The build-up in the press before the release of The Intern suggested that this trend (writing age-appropriate roles for A-list actors) was golden. It seemed like a formula that could do no wrong.

The box office hasn’t been bad, but the critical reactions have been decidedly luke-warm. So what is it that Meyers and team have done that’s so wrong?

I do think The Guardian’s female film critic had a point. The majority of screen critics and commentators are men between the ages of 30 and 50, and they can be extremely vocal in their dislike. I call them the Breaking Bad brigade. They were loudly critical of shows with female leads like The C Word and Weeds, but when the premise of each show was tied together and given a male lead, the same critics wrote article after article about the originality of Breaking Bad.

What do the TV shows The C Word and Weeds have in common with the movie The Intern? They hit too close to the bone in the premise they depict.

A lot of guys over 30 spend all day every day worrying that they’ll be replaced by some young hotshot in his 20s. Of course watching The Intern or Weeds will make a guy like that panic.

Who wants to take the night off from work and relationship tensions, pay twenty bucks to see a movie, only to see their worst fears up there on screen?

Now your average aging guy isn’t just competing to keep his job against the 20-something guys, he’s in competition with every intelligent, competent female too? And for what?

In Meyer’s previous film, Something’s Gotta Give, the male audience could root for Jack Nicholson’s character because, sure he was an old guy, but he was rich, he owned a rap label and he was still wildly attractive to women under 30. By contrast, the De Niro character in The Intern starts the film as a sad guy, alone and humiliatingly obsolete.

When Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson played two aging 40-something no-hopers who intern at Google, it wasn’t too close to the bone — it was amusing because we’d all already seem them buddy-up in The Wedding Crashers. We knew we wouldn’t be faced with too much reality, we knew that our two male underdogs would come out victors, and we knew that there would be no real challenge to the status quo. Sure, Rose Byrne is in there as a successful female, but she gets a few minutes of screen time.

In contrast, The Intern does hold up a mirror to the troubling truth. The De Niro character did work hard, he was a success, he did have it all, yet he then inexplicably has to start again from zero when he re-enters the business world. And he’s opposite an intelligent, successful woman who is supporting her husband who has no career of his own. How is that not every guy’s worst fear?

Plus, some guys feel betrayed by De Niro. It is one thing to save a talentless, helpless damsel in distress, but here’s a female protagonist who is more successful, harder working, more resourceful and nicer than her cheating husband. Why’s De Niro helping a chick like that out? It’s a long way from Travis Bickle.

It’s bleak and confronting for a female audience too. For the most part, movies are about escapism. In Cinderella a gal, who is a good person but has no wealth or opportunities, ends up with a guy who’s a total catch.

In contrast, The Intern kind of says that if you’re a successful female, the best you can do is marry a guy who doesn’t contribute. You’ll get cheated on, you won’t kick him out, you’ll nearly lose your business success because your personal life distracted you and in the end you’ll settle for a compromise. Not the most romantic or aspirational fantasy.

So how are we screenwriters supposed to write the new, diverse, complex, realistic, and challenging parts that interest prominent actors without forsaking the audience?

I think the answer lies in understanding and accepting the deepest fears of your audience.

Where your screenplay challenges societal and cultural norms in the A story, you should counterbalance with more comfortable and familiar elements in other areas of the script.

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Fin Wheeler is a member of the Australian Writers’ Guild and has a feature in development.