It’s only a matter of days before the boy in Annie’s charge makes a ludicrous U-turn from hellion into little angel. In a Mary Poppins-inspired fantasy, she is also shown sailing across the New York skyline under a red umbrella.īut such whimsical touches have no connection with the substance of the movie, which consists mostly of soapsuds. In a sequence at the American Museum of Natural History, Annie, playing tour guide, points to various social types, posed like prehistoric figures in dioramas. The pair, who created “American Splendor,” the quirky portrait of the Cleveland comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, make amusing use of Annie’s anthropology studies.
#The nanny movie movie
Johansson may smolder invitingly in certain roles, but “The Nanny Diaries” is the latest in a string of films that suggest that this somnolent actress confuses sullen attitudinizing with acting.Įspecially at the beginning of “The Nanny Diaries” there are signs that its directing and writing team, Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, had a different movie in mind. With her heavy-lidded eyes and plump lips, Ms. Johansson’s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor. But just before the big bad wolves - the rich and powerful - are about devour the Little Red Riding Hoods in these books, they see the light and parachute into improbably soft landings.īecause “The Nanny Diaries” is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. Her relationship with her childhood best friend (Alicia Keys) also suffers. In both stories the dutiful young acolytes become so caught up in their bosses’ horrid compulsions that their very souls are threatened friends and family go by the wayside.Īnnie lies to her mother, a nurse (Donna Murphy) who has pinched pennies to pay for her daughter’s college education, by telling her she has a trainee job on Wall Street. The screen adaptations of these two chick-lit blockbusters follow the same formulaic path from naïveté to shock to disillusionment and ultimately to purification. Streep’s Miranda never, ever raises her voice. Linney’s Park Avenue mother can be heard screaming at her husband behind closed doors, Ms. X barks to Grayer that he had better be ready to take over the world next week.) Miranda, however, calls the shots in her life. (In one of his few exchanges with his son Mr. X, for all her pretensions of grandeur, must answer to her husband (Paul Giamatti), a crude, ugly, foulmouthed boor who keeps his wife on a tight leash. Streep’s chilly fashion empress are markedly different personalities.
#The nanny movie driver
X is as much a slave driver as Miranda Priestly, the fashion editor indelibly played by Meryl Streep in the movie version of the novel “The Devil Wears Prada.”īut Ms. X to be the latest in a stream of nannies for her spoiled little boy, Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art). The movie, like the book, is narrated by Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson), a New Jersey-born anthropology student hired by Mrs. She is a smart, flexible actress who invests her role, a composite of former employers of the novel’s authors, with enough humanity to arouse some pity. X, a Park Avenue socialite, as a monstrous control freak. Linney defies a screenplay that paints her character, Mrs. As this exposé of the rich and miserable on the Upper East Side wobbles along uncertainly, it rests on the tense, squared shoulders of Laura Linney. “The Nanny Diaries,” a scattershot screen adaptation of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s 2002 satirical beach read, has one unassailable asset.
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