Most everyone has worked at least one painfully awful job in their lifetime. For some, it was scooping sticky ice cream all summer at the local Baskin Robbins. For others, it was entering mind-numbing data into Microsoft Excel for eight hours a day in a back office with no windows. For Annie Braddock, it was working on the glamorous Upper East Side in Manhattan. But how, you may ask, could any sane person reject the opportunity to work in the wealthiest part of one of the greatest cities in the world? That is the question “The Nanny Diaries” uses as its jumping off point. In a similar chick-lit-turned-blockbuster-hit vein as “The Devil Wears Prada,” this film is based on the identically named, bestselling novel written by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus.
Scarlett Johansson stars as the intelligent but ambivalent Annie (later to be referred to only as “Nanny”), who has just graduated from NYU with a degree in business and a minor in anthropology. As a result of her studies, Annie has a tendency to approach the people and places she encounters from an anthropologist’s point-of-view. Thus, when she is mistaken for a professional nanny by a wealthy mother in Central Park, Annie sees the resulting job offer as an opportunity for an in-depth case study of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, not to mention an excellent way of avoiding the start of “real life.”
However, as such stories tend to go, what begins as an interesting chance to glimpse a different sort of world turns into a hellish trip down the rabbit hole as Annie becomes far too involved in the lives of her employers, Mr. and Mrs. X, played by Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney; and as their son, Grayer, becomes far too attached to Annie. Annie is inducted into a land of children who are raised entirely by the hired help, fathers who are chronically absent and mothers who find themselves too busy shopping to spend a few moments of the day with their son or daughter.
All of which is, yes, a bit cliché. The directors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, have clearly tried to lift the film out of the predictable path that the book laid out for it, but instead have done such things as creating bizarre dream sequences involving New York’s Museum of Natural History, as well as a red umbrella which I took to be a strange reference to Mary Poppins, none of which fits in with the tone of the rest of the film. Johansson’s acting is a bit overdone (her style seems to work better in more independent films), and her constant voiceovers are cringe inducing. Linney, on the other hand, gives a performance comparable to Meryl Streep’s in “Prada.” As an actor who usually plays more sympathetic characters, I was surprised and delighted to see such a cold, reserved version of Linney here. Her Mrs. X is pitch-perfect, and probably makes the film worth seeing more than anything else.
Despite Linney’s outstanding performance, “The Nanny Diaries” is a rather hollow, one-sided depiction of New York City’s elite. Unsure of whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama, the film bounces back and forth between the two, taking the viewer on a rather bumpy ride.
106 minutes
