I sometimes have a bit of a sweet tooth for Nancy Meyers’s Ephron-lite diversions, but this, frankly … eww. The cutesiness factor and ickiness quotient are just too high. Writer-director Meyers flips the premise of The Devil Wears Prada by making Anne Hathaway the boss of a super-successful web-retail fashion business. She plays Jules – stressed and unsatisfied, like all career women, and now landed with an adorable old guy as her assistant, due to her firm’s forward-thinking policy of hiring “senior interns”.
This is Ben, played by Robert De Niro, a nice widower; he’s a hilarious fish out of water among all these young hipsters, but turns out to be someone on whose grandfatherly wisdom she comes to rely. Just to forestall any suggestion of an inappropriate relationship with Jules, incidentally, 70-year-old Ben is enjoying red-blooded relations with the firm’s in-office masseuse, played by 61-year-old Rene Russo.
As for Jules, she’s the boss, though her female employees include a cringing assistant to whom Ben presumes to make remarks about weight, and a foolish woman who can’t drive too well. Her husband and child are truly sucrose, and they are the focus of a personal crisis for which the movie exonerates Jules of blame – just about. Hathaway is on hectoring and charmless form and as for De Niro, there are scenes of him talking to himself in the mirror and chauffeuring Anne about. I’m hoping these aren’t playful references to Taxi Driver.
