A recent college graduate takes a detour on her career path to work for an extremely demanding female boss in Manhattan. Though she mocks the values of the people she works for, she nonetheless gets drawn into their world and strives to please them, at the cost of her personal life. You could easily mistake this plot for that of The Devil Wears Prada, another movie adapted from a bestselling novel. (In fact, a copy of Prada can be seen in a beach scene.)
The young graduate, Nan, is here played by Scarlet Johannson, the wicked boss by Laura Linney; there’s also a four-your-old child and a little-seen husband, played by Paul Giammatti. Linney’s character is called Mrs. X. Whereas this gives the novel the feel of a confessional, in a movie, where we can actually see Mrs. X, it merely seems awkward. One thing that was changed from the novel is that the heroine now has no experience. Her potential employers’ apparent willingness to overlook things like references, sort of explained by her being white and native born, still strains credulity, especially given Mrs. X’s overall overprotectiveness.
This is the second non-documentary feature from the married writer-director team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. As with their acclaimed American Splendor (which starred Giammatti), they incorporate some fanciful visuals into the movie, including a couple that nod to that most famous of movie nannies, Mary Poppins. As excessively narrated by Johannson, the movie is an extended metaphor in which the wealthy Upper East Side wife is seen as a unique culture, like that of a tribe in some faraway place. Clever, but more so as an idea than as actually executed in the movie. Primarily this is so because the story actually reveals little about either nannies or the wealthy elite that you wouldn’t already imagine. The narration apologizes in advance for engaging in “geographic profiling,¨ e.g. the observation that “adultery is pathologically ignored” among these ladies of leisure. Of course, stereotypes can be true, but rarely tell all. Where Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly was, in Prada, both a type and something more, Linney is the perfect picture of the spoiled trophy wife, but only that. (Giamatti is even more one-dimensional.) Where Prada was witty and sharp, The Nanny Diaries is merely likable, the wishful-thinking ending being symptomatic. (“Don’t think having money makes it any easier,” we’re told. Really?)
This is the kind of movie I like. It’s fun to watch the clash of different values; it’s interesting to watch the behavior of those whose money insulates them from having to do things they don’t want, like take their children to school. The relationship between the nanny has some interesting parts, even if the boy’s rubberband transition from hating to loving her is too easy. Except for the way the heroine gets simultaneously courted by a dozen women without even trying, which is embarrassingly silly (men, maybe), there’s nothing particularly bad about this movie. But nothing good enough to recommend, either.
IMDB link
reviewed 8/30/07
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