Robert De Niro wears an Omega Seamaster

On Ben Whittaker's left wrist, just below the cuff of a dark suit, sits a small round watch with a polished pale case and a light dial, on a dark leather strap. Robert De Niro plays Ben in Nancy Meyers's The Intern (2015), a 70-year-old widower who spent forty years at a company that printed phone books and now, restless in retirement, signs on as a senior intern at About the Fit, Jules Ostin's online fashion startup in Brooklyn. He wears a suit to an office of hoodies and open laptops, and still carries a leather attaché case. He also keeps a handkerchief, which he says is really there for lending to someone else who needs it.

The watch is an Omega Seamaster. Permanent Style, in an essay on the film's clothes, calls it "an understated Omega Seamaster," and that fits both the dress-watch shape on screen and the analog man wearing it. Omega started the Seamaster in 1948, its hundredth year. The design drew on the water-resistant watches the company had made for British forces during the war. Ben's brings none of that to the desk. It is a mechanical watch on leather in an office that runs on screens.

Past the brand, the details thin out. A collector on the Omega forums reads it as a Seamaster 30, the slim hand-wound model Omega sold in the 1960s, reference 135.003, then grants that the freeze-frame is too poor to be sure, and no clearer look at the dial has surfaced. The film never asks you to notice. The trail ends where the menswear writer left it, at an Omega Seamaster, a watch line named for the sea, on the wrist of a retired phone-book executive interning at a Brooklyn startup.