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To the careful viewer, Nancy Meyers’ The Intern (2015) has some conflicting and confusing things to say about gender politics.

The story follows the recently widowed former executive of a phonebook company, Ben (Robert DeNiro), who finds that Tai Chi and Starbucks aren’t filling his days, so he applies to become a senior intern at a rising Brooklyn tech startup selling well-fitting women’s clothes, About the Fit. The company’s do-it-herself CEO Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway) rides her bike through the office to maximize efficiency and spends her precious time on over-achieving customer service calls, generally annoying her employees with her array of quirks. Jules has no time for her new intern at first, but she soon realizes Ben is a more valuable resource than any of the tech-savvy youths surrounding her.

The focus on a cross-generational, platonic relationship is an enjoyable and uncommon foundation for a film that can be comic and warm, if bland and focused solely on moneyed white New Yorkers who believe the pinnacle of life achievement is succeeding in career and romance in order to feel personally satisfied.

But the film does try to be politically correct in a “You go, girl!” vein – so why does it slip, in moments, into what feels like a stunningly conservative idea of gender politics?

On the one hand, Ben is Jules’ greatest fan, encouraging her to remain the CEO of her company despite investor pressure to hire an older, experienced male to take on the role as About the Fit expands. While half-heartedly going through the CEO search, Jules finally admits to wanting to remain CEO herself (a glaringly obvious fact) and confesses that she is nevertheless considering the switch to save her marriage to her husband, stay-at-home dad Matt (Anders Helm). [SPOILERS AHEAD] Matt seems at first to be the ideal supportive man – sweet, funny, inquisitive, extensively involved in their daughters’ life, and apparently not resentful or accusatory. But Ben learns (and we learn that Jules already knows) Matt is having an affair with another mother at their daughter’s school.

Jules seems shockingly ready to overlook the affair and move on. Weeks have passed without her confronting her husband, and she doesn’t entertain the idea of leaving. Ben questions Jules’ willingness to stay with Matt, and the film calls attention to Jules’ surprisingly unempowered reaction to her husband’s infidelity when Ben jokes that he shouldn’t have to be the feminist in the conversation.

Jules later accepts that she should not sacrifice her career to make her husband feel less emasculated, disowning her earlier implication that her overworking is to blame for her husband’s affair — so the film, in a way, presents this idea in order to dismiss it. No, we’re told (eventually), an ambitious woman is not at fault if her husband cheats. But did this suggestion really have to be raised in the first place, to be dismissed? Perhaps, it does — perhaps the film is reflecting the still-conservative underpinnings of today’s climate of hostility toward working moms even in supposedly progressive cities like New York.

Still, while the film satirizes the judgmental attitude of non-working moms toward Jules’ success, it doesn’t fully back up its denial that Jules’ excessive work schedule isn’t to blame for her husband’s indiscretion. Jules reconciles too easily with Matt, and she finds the self-confidence she needs in her work through the correcting wisdom of an older, more experienced man (Ben). So while the film tries to address the social issues many stilll have about reversed gender roles — our tendency to view a stay-at-home dad as emasculated, funny, or weak, or to view a female CEO as annoying, insensitive, or selfish — it doesn’t entirely avoid making those same implications in the way the characters are written. (Hathaway’s performance has been praised for how she turns her character’s measure of unlikeability into an asset for a complex performance.)

We also note that, while the film celebrates and enjoys Ben’s elderly moments, his new love – while not Hathaway’s age—is notably younger and more attractive than him. The Hollywood Reporter writes, “He’s been given a romantic interest in Rene Russo (wonderful, as always), who’s a more age-appropriate mate than Hathaway. She is still a decade younger than De Niro, however, and undeniably glamorous. It’s interesting that the film rejects the idea that Ben might have a romance with a woman his own age. When such a character appears in the person of Linda Lavin, she comes across as some kind of gorgon and sends him fleeing in horror.”

Ultimately, the film holds up DeNiro’s Ben as the pinnacle of personal wisdom and solid business sense. This elderly intern represents the value of seasoned experience that Jules and her ageist Brooklynite youths have wrongly discounted. Really, the film’s message is this: for all their apps and start-ups, the young have as much as ever to learn from the old, and we should respect our elders.

Still, the gender implications of Jules’ personal growth through the mentorship of a male elder and her reunion with the weak-willed, unfaithful husband create some tricky questions for the viewer about what exactly The Intern is implying about working women.