The Nanny Diaries

Scarlett Johansson stars in this enjoyable, whimsical adaptation of the bestselling novel. BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK Salon.com SATURDAY, AUG 25, 2007

The Nanny Diaries is an adamantly unterrible picture, a reasonably enjoyable diversion made by filmmakers whose intelligence and judgment are apparent even when theyre working from a cream puff. (Berman and Pulcini adapted the movie themselves from the perfectly entertaining 2002 novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, a supposedly semiautobiographical but obviously highly varnished story of a college-grad nanny who goes to work for a frightful rich-bitch mom on New Yorks Upper East Side. The Nanny Diaries has some problems: It loses too much steam in the last third, and it feels perhaps 10 minutes too long. It also suffers from that overused and lazy technique, voice-over-itis. But this troubled picture is far more enjoyable than slick, aggressively hyped duds like The Devil Wears Prada. It may be polished, but unlike that picture, it doesnt feel canned. And we can suffer worse fates than getting to look at Scarlett Johansson for an hour and 40 minutes: The role doesnt demand much of her shes simply playing a young woman in her first, lousy job out of school but the performance is at least subdued and believable. Its the kind of turn for which you get out the carving knives only if you really have nothing better to do in life. Johansson plays Annie, a Jersey girl who has just graduated from college with a semiuseless anthropology degree. Her mom, a hardworking nurse (played by Donna Murphy), wants her to go into finance. But Annie, like most people of her age, isnt quite sure what she wants, so she falls into a job that she thinks, at first, might be fun: She becomes the caretaker for a preschool-age kid with the ridiculously pretentious name of Grayer (Nicholas Art), whose mom is an icy trophy wife known only as Mrs. X (a deliciously reptilian Laura Linney). The job seems OK at first, until Annie realizes that the high-strung, controlling Mrs. X is a monster to work for, the kind of woman who has no job and yet who thinks shopping is far more important than spending time with her child. But Mrs. X is also deeply unhappy in her sham of a marriage to Mr. X, a captain of industry played with villainous relish by Paul Giamatti: The tensions between them cause their child a great deal of suffering. Annie, mistreated and underappreciated, bonds with her young charge hes a decent kid, despite the fact that his parents are assholes and also with the other nannies, many of them women of color, or women (of all ages) who have come from other countries to make a better living, often leaving their own families behind to care for rich American ones. The Nanny Diaries isnt heavy-duty satire, but it doesnt turn a blind eye to class and race issues, either. Annie falls for a cute guy in the X familys building: Not wanting to get too attached to him, owing to their class differences, she refers to him only as the Harvard Hottie. (Hes played, breezily, by Chris Evans.) But the movie is smart enough to show that even though Annie pays lip service to the idea that money cant buy happiness, she hypocritically continues to assume that it does. In a brief scene, late in the movie, Annie learns something about the money/happiness equation from the Harvard Hottie, a mark of the storys generosity toward its characters. Berman and Pulcini add perhaps a few too many whimsical touches, including tableaux of Upper East Side life set up as if they were Museum of Natural History dioramas. Still, they never veer too deeply into the territory of cute. Some of the actors here just dont have enough to do. Alicia Keys appears as Annies best friend from home, and its a pity she doesnt get more screen time: Shes lively and likable. But whatever its faults are, The Nanny Diaries is hardly the disaster that the gossipmongers including, perhaps, even the studio that made it want us to believe. Troubled? Maybe. But at least it has a pulse. Its hardly DOA.

The Nanny Diaries Philip French The Guardian, Sunday 14 October 2007 23.50 BST The lovely Scarlett Johansson plays the lower-middle-class Jersey girl Annie, a recent anthropology graduate who, like her idol Margaret Mead, views the world in anthropological terms. After deciding against a high-powered business career, she takes a job as a nanny to a rich couple (Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti) on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The movie is never particularly funny, but it paints an appalling picture of the empty, anxious, fashion-conscious lives of wealthy, upper-middle-class wives, their workaholic husbands, the way they simultaneously neglect and spoil their kids and the negligent, thoughtless manner in which they exploit their servants. The principal difference between the servitude of the Upper West Side nannies and their Filipina counterparts employed by Saudi housewives is that the American employers let the women keep their passports. The film's satirical thrust is blunted first by romance, then by sentimentality.

The Nanny Diaries: A Nice Surprise By Richard Schickel Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007 Time.com Annie (Scarlett Johansson) flunks out of the fast track in the business world (too tongue-tied) and she lacks the self-confidence to follow her heart's desire, which is to become an anthropologist. Upshot? She gets a job as a nanny, which consists mainly of civilizing Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art), the spoiled, emotionally retarded, but redeemable, offspring of a tensely striving Manhattan couple known only as Mr. and Mrs. X (Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti). In effect, her diary treats the Xs as if they were residents of a primitive island culture, with Annie the Nanny as their own personal Margaret Mead making notes on an exotic culture. The result is a movie that is much better than a slick adaptation of a best-selling novel has any right to be. That's largely because The Nanny Diaries is written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the smart and cinematically alert couple who brought us American Splendor, that weird, affecting study of the strange life and hard times of Harvey Pekar, the underground comics virtuoso. Harvey (also played by Giamatti) inhabited the American sub-basement; the Xs live near the top of the American heap. But in their solipsism, their emotional cluelessness, their resistance to normal human intercourse, they are, in some sense, his evil soulmates. As for Annie, she has straggled up out of working class New Jersey, bright, pretty, common-sensical, but without the social skills or self-confidence to master a hostile environment . In what spare time she has very little she likes to repair to the Museum of Natural History, there to commune with the dioramas that portray the simple family lives of primitive peoples. In what is the movie's masterstroke, she begins seeing the Xs and their friends as figures in various dioramas as well frozen in their ritualized (and counterproductive) attempts to nurture their child. Her sessions at the museum bring a certain calm to Annie, and perhaps a certain perspective to the field notes she's keeping on the Xs behavior. On the other hand, nothing can quite prepare anyone for the "Nannycam," hidden in a teddy bear, with which they keep an eye on her activities. Or justify their insistence that feeding little Grayer French cuisine may improve his language skills and thus enhance their hopes that he will gain admission to the right school. Or enhance Annie's hopes of hooking up with the "Harvard hottie" (Chris Evans), who lives upstairs and keeps casting a loving, ironic eye on her.

The Nanny Diaries is something of an odd-duck movie. It is not a broad comedy or a wildly romantic one, either. Nor is it Edith Wharton lite. But it does partake of all those modes in intelligently observant ways. It is, as well, blessed by Johansson's appealing performance and by Linney's tense, taut one. The former may be an insecure innocent, but there is a determination of spirit about her that is, in the end, rather touching. She is somehow going to rescue her little charge from false values. She may be something of a klutz, but she by golly knows that little boys sometimes need to eat peanut butter straight from the jar no matter what his uptight mom thinks the long-term consequences of that act may be. Linney is appealing in a different way, as a woman subtly suggesting that she knows better than to act out of the social anxieties that oppress her, but having trouble fighting her way free of them. In the end she does liberate herself. And in the end The Nanny Diaries is an entertaining study of how class warfare honest working girl vs. the arrivistes works out in a society that likes to pretend that such warfare is a thing of the past. It isn't, of course, and the movie is tender enough, tough enough and wise enough finally to broker a satisfying truce between the combatants.