Even with such a solid cast, this could have easily been a movie that completely missed its own points. We could have had two hours of Robert De Niro messing up computers and not knowing "what a Twitter is"; two hours of Anne Hathaway putting her work before her family, being a terrible mother, an awful boss, and a worse wife, all to realise that she was "prioritising the wrong things". Thankfully, that isn't what The Intern wanted to be.
Instead, we get a loving little tale about friendship, wrapped up in a bunch of morality around biased expectations, ageism, and sexism, in the modern workforce and society as a whole. We get a raft of surprisingly multidimensional characters and a series of realistic, simplistic trials that they are facing in their lives. There are no clear villains (even the VC plant never really turns into anything awful) or perfectly virtuous white knights, just a sea of grey.
Okay, I could have done without the bizarre breaking-and-entering sequence to delete an email (it probably just went to the mum's phone anyway). And some of the "real men don't look like boys" tropes were extremely heavy-handed, to the extent that they successfully bludgeoned that point to death. But, overall, I enjoyed the film.
I enjoyed having a non-romantic romcom relationship. I enjoyed that the widower got to have a completely natural, human secondary romance without any drama or slapstick misunderstandings. I enjoyed that the husband was cheating not out of jealousy or bitterness towards his more successful life, but because he'd been afraid that he couldn't be there for her and had drifted away (a much more natural and realistic circumstance, and one that felt reasonable to actually overcome). I liked that most people were just, well, people. That's a bit refreshing.