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Movie Review: The Nanny Diaries
by Bill Wine
The last film by the co-directors of The Nanny Diaries was 2003's American Splendor.
It was stylized, stimulating, and, appropriately enough, splendid.
The Nanny Diaries is similarly stylized but largely stultifying, and utterly lacking in splendor.
Grandparents can expect to be underwhelmed, grandchildren underserved by this inauspicious comedy-drama, rated PG-13 for language reasons only.
Real-life husband-and-wife Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have adapted, and delivered their version of, the best-selling 2002 satirical novel by former New York nannies Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus without quite solving the puzzle of just how it should be cinematized.
Scarlett Johansson stars as Annie Braddock, a recent NYU graduate from working-class North Jersey.
The film opens in the Museum of Natural History.
Annie, not knowing what to do with her degree in finance and thinking she might want to be an anthropologist, is, although she doesn't know it yet, about to embark on a contemporary anthropological expedition.
Her mom, a nurse (Donna Murphy), urges her to use her academic background to join the business world. But Annie, wanting to "find herself" first, impulsively accepts a Central Park offer to work as a nanny for a moneyed family on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Her juggling act then begins in earnest.
For not only is Annie the Nanny to be the caregiver to an attention-starved 5-year-old boy.
She also becomes something of a referee in the disintegrating marriage of the boy's parents, referred to coyly as Mr. and Mrs. X (played by Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti).
SHE is self-absorbed, self-deluded, and impossibly demanding: a complete control freak. HE is ambitious, adulterous, essentially absentee, and lecherous to boot: a complete louse with a checkbook.
Meanwhile, there's a good-looking guy in the building, a Harvard grad played by Chris Evans, who pursues Annie until she gratefully relents.
Neither Johansson nor Linney is quite comfortable playing this kind of broad comedy, although there's not much need for either one to be funny, because the film really isn't.
And the versatile Paul Giammati is nonetheless miscast: He seems on loan somehow from another movie.
The larger problem, though, is that the principals are underwritten caricatures, more like anthropological displays in a diorama case than living, breathing characters.
That may be why not one of the relationships comes across as convincing.
We don't buy Annie's feelings for the boy, even though we feel pity for him; we don't buy her devoid-of-chemistry romance with the "Harvard Hottie," as she calls him; and we wouldn't buy the marriage of the X's even if they were already exes.
As for the narrated anthropological overlay, it comes across as too arch and precious by half.
The seriocomic film lacks a dramatic center and emotional point of entry: We might as well be glancing through a glass partition at a museum tableau.
In a way, we end up in this disappointingly edgeless exploration of one part of New York City's class system.
The Nanny Diaries just leaves far too many of its pages blank to propel us from front cover to back.
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